vswpaper's Diaryland Diary

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Draft two out for review

I'm still a little surprised to be finished with the lion's share of the work. This morning, I got started straightaway and managed to stay on task while working around my usual duties--didn't watch the last extra on the Psycho DVD (the trailer, which was intermittently good) until I was finished, and didn't dip into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at all. I had one last quote of Bernard's to work in, where he's defiant about going on with life and conflates it with making phrases, and had to recast the thesis statement for reiteration at the end. The latter was MUCH easier than I thought it would be (I had a misapprehension of what it needed to be worked into and how long it needed to be). And then just some word choices that I'd tagged. In a couple cases they led me to improve the surrounding paragraph. It's very odd, that word choice business. Because sometimes it really can lead you in a slightly different direction and improve things; and other times the placeholder you've got in turns out to be completely wrong and it's only by trying without success to replace it that you strike out and find the right one.

So I sent it off to my friends and I hope they'll get back to me by Wednesday, and that they'll have very little feedback.

Then I headed off to the library to start on the citations and bibliography. It was difficult to force myself to really read The Chicago Manual of Style (which I'm using because my prof said it was acceptable and I already own it for work) and find what I needed. For a bit I thought I was going to have to use footnotes instead of in-text parentheticals, but I found my way to what I needed pretty quickly.

It's an odd feeling to be mainly done and have some freedom while the paper's in front of my friends to do what I want. And curiously, when I walked up to Suzallo today, I felt an unfamiliar sense of entitlement, like I have a right to be going here. It's the familiarity, I suppose, and possibly the Wagner I was listening to on my iPod. But I could imagine myself on the Berkeley campus feeling differently as well, feeling a confidence that was certainly unusual, if indeed I ever felt it there at all.

5:45 p.m. - 2007-03-10

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