13 working days and dissertation is a mess. is this normal? comments from any of you academics out there particularly welcome

[thewomanwhothoughtshewasahat]

it's all crumbling away. It's already 17,000 words when the limit is 15,000 and I genuinely feel that to do what I set out to do it probably needs to be 25,000. It's all more complicated than I thought it was going to be...don;t know whether to go for major overhaul - drop a section thus allowing me to keep the detail already covered. or whether to keep all the sections and risk, imo, rendering them superficial. arrrrgh.

My PhD thesis was handed in 25 minutes before the 5 year deadline, so you have oodles of time left! No word limit though thank the lord.

Do you have a supervisor you can run these things past?

no superviser to speak of. there is someone I could try to tap for help but not sure if I'm meant to - have a strange and ill-defined system of non-supervision - and not sure if he'll actually be any help anyway.

depends on yr subject & supervisor, but some places can be extremely strict on word limits so wdn't recommend allowing it to continue to run over w/o checking 1st with yr tutor. ditto on sections - how wd it make sense to drop a section??

drafting, redrafting etc etc as you know is just part of the process. I'd take a break of a few hrs, if you can spare the time and come to it afresh tomorrow with some serious editing/cutting back of the whole draft in mind.

there's no question about going over the word limit. complete no-no. just don;t know what to do to rein it in.

ah, just read yr last comment. I'd cover yr back then by just checking out departmtal policies on dissertations, how rigid their guidelines are.

A lack of supervision makes me cross.

My instinct is depth rather than breadth, but I know nothing!

Hope someone with some experience in you area can advise you.

the lack of supervision is - allegedly - intentional. they make a big thing about it being independent, unsupervised work. knowing what I know about this institution that's resting on their laurels - they know they'll get good work coz there are a lot of v motivated people. so they don;t see the point in investing a bit of effort into it and making it better. it's been a bit like that all year. pretty much self-taught, tbh. makes my tummy flip when I thin how much I spent on the bloody thing.

Can you keep the body of the dissertation to 15,000 words but have a big appendix of data?

put the differnt chunks on to diff colour paper and read through them, highlight what is reapeated elsewhere and delete, use appendices, check you've not include bibliography in word count

Only just seen this. With my disertation there was a word limit but we were allowed to go ten per cent either way, so could that also be the case for you? Nothing more helpful to offer I'm afraid, but good luck x I quite foolishly left my disertation until the last 2 days But I work best under extreme pressure, and I got a first for it

Drop a section AND cut back generally. There is always stuff to cut back, longer doesn't mean better. Go through it and through it cutting out words/sentences/sections, there are bound to be bits where you have repeated yourself.

If you have a literature section (not sure what subject you're doing), it's easy to cut whole chunks out of that, keep in the citations but shorten your description of previous studies or theories. etc

and then go and do it again til you're down to the right number of words. it is possible, you just have to do it bit by bit and then go over it again.

My advice to you if you need to get the word limit down is to be absolutely ruthless. A good way of doing this is to sum up your central thesis "I want to show how x and y work in z," for example, in just a sentence (or two at a push). Type this out, stick it above your computer and take it from there. This will be your constant point of reference--anything that does not advance or clarify this thesis has to go. Then you work through what you have, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph (and get rid of the adjectives while you're at it). If it's not explicitly relevant (no matter how interesting) then you need to bin it. The process is hard, but actually quite liberating because you'll see a much clearer central thread emerge from it all. Hope this helps.

Good luck.

sorry not an academic

i would always say write what you need to write (i.e. the 25000) and then start cutting. sorry if it's too close to deadline for that.

Oh, and yes, it's normal. Too much a lot better than too little.

No advice- but wanted to wish you luck and sympathy. I'm sure you'll work it out.

I remember looking for a binder for dh's phd who could do a quick turn around and he could meet a deadline!

Would that be 9 days now? How is it?