One Week

I have to give the most final draft of my thesis I can manage to my advisors in one week. They'll actually have to "sign off" on it the day before, to give me time to submit some paper work to the grad school so I can present the project and then graduate. But the 14th is when I give them the whole thing--typo-less and as coherent as I can make it in the next 7 days.

I've got a draft, and its long. The whole thing, with conclusion has topped out at 150 pages, including back matter, bibliography and the like. Long. I hope to make some cuts, but I didn't see many ideal areas to do so in my re-reading of the whole thing in one piece over the past few days. Some things I have discovered while re-reading:

Chapter four is a disaster.  Fixable, but it needs to be re-organized and there are big parts that I may just jettison if I can't figure out how to better integrate them. I'm mortified that I actually showed it to anyone, but a big thanks goes out to E. for reading and commenting upon it.

Chapter 5 is better than I thought it might be, though it does need some tightening, adds and reorganization, too. Kudos to D. for reading that one and giving me unexpectedly detailed feedback.

Six has some stumpers from a reorg perspective, but a better level of internal consistency than the other two central chapters. Hopefully P will have time to read this one.

The intro and beginning materials are pretty good and won't need too much additional work, thank goodness. Thanks to J. for reading these materials.

This thesis is a highly inter-disciplinary project, quite fitting given the nature of The Program. But that means that I drop in for a visit with a lot of disciplines (psychology, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology), but I don't stay too long with any of them. Which I think makes interesting connections, but will definitely open me up to criticism from practitioners within those disciplines who could critique me for not delving deeply enough into a particular subject.

Anyway, there's lots of work left to be done, but I think I do see a glimmer of light...