Day 19: It's not the worst thing I've read

Current Paper - 26,800 words/80 references

I did a mostly complete read-through of my paper yesterday.  I came up with almost two hundred things that still need to be done, even assuming I'm not fleshing out certain sections that I don't have data for.  That sounds daunting, but most of them were small.

The best thing was that it's not bad.  I know from experience that other readers will find certain sections incomprehensible and it's pretty light on meat.  A lot of content is just discussion and unproven best practice, which is less than ideal for a computer science dissertation.  But if it gets to where I see it in my head with some of the diagrams and lists and some more of the interesting detail stuff, it definitely won't be the worst dissertation I've read.

Most importantly, it's really the dissertation that I wanted to write.  It's the topics that I care about instead of the topics that I think would look the most impressive.  My academic strength are not discovering novel information retrieval models, or finding ways to improve machine learning algorithms.  My strength is that I was a web programmer before I was a web researcher and I respect the value of the complexity of a Web page.

My plan is to spend the rest of the day trying to knock off that to-do list and then spend tomorrow working on diagrams and figures that will go a long way toward breaking up some of the page-long descriptions...people love pictures.  If all goes well, I'll send a rough draft of the paper to my advisor on Sunday and see what she thinks.

The best part about this is that it's now to the point where I would have to be an idiot to fail.  I have 77 pages (which may be closer to 100 after formatting and diagrams, etc.) of fairly cohesive text that will serve as a framework to put things even if it needs to get longer.  There is no 10-ton albatross hanging around my neck anymore.  It's more like a finch....ok, maybe a raven.