vswpaper's Diaryland
Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation drudgery
Lawd, does it ever take a long time to get all the book citations in. I finished them today by really pushing myself--what a boring job. And they aren't all done. I have to look up the proper form for short pieces collected in a volume, check on the library information for the volume of essays I checked out (which I think I'll be able to cull just from the library website), and finalize the form for the actual bibiography entries. I do think I was right to leave them to the end, though, rather than wasting energy stopping myself as I went to get them right. It's just that the assembly-line aspect of it is as boring as that always is.
I'm wondering now about proofreading. I'd really like to have someone else do that job, but who? Despite my professional experience, I really don't think I can proof my own stuff much better than anyone else can do theirs. Maybe I should get it done professionally? I hadn't considered that until just now. I wonder how long it would take, and how much it would cost. And part of me still thinks that if I take care, I could do it myself--but it's precisely the taking care when I'm well and truly sick of something that's the problem.
I've also been having horrible misgivings about the paper, which I hope are just the inevitable qualms attendant on coming to the finish. My big worry is that my style--stacking up a lot of quotes from disparate areas--is ill-suited to a longer paper with several sources. That it becomes disjointed and seems like I'm just cherry-picking quotes, and I could say just anything if I picked the pieces correctly. But I don't think I'm saying just anything. What I'm talking about makes sense against the background of Woolf's writing. I'm teasing out something particular within the general truth about her writing--not scotching up a contradiction to the larger view of her writing. And I do set up the fragmentary approach as part of my argument--I've had this worry before and was amazed to find that I'd set things up properly by talking about how Woolf doesn't make an argument or make up characters that exemplify some simple division, and that her method means you have to find "dabs" that taken as a mass tell you something.
Really, I wish I'd heard back, even on email, from one of my reviewers. Their silence is probably what's edging me into the fidgets. And it's not as if they're late or something. They have lives to lead as well as my paper to read.
8:36 p.m. - 2007-03-11
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
previous - next
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|