Tuesday, April 20, 2010

My revision (or, Will this Ordeal Never End?)

Still from the 1903 moving picture Sherlock Ho...Image via Wikipedia
I'm probably going to do a lot more revision between now and Friday.  I wasn't all that unhappy with my intermediate draft, except for the big disaster with the DVD featurette.  I'm thinking now that I should have taken Toffee up on her offer to pretend that didn't happen.  On the other hand, I can see that the new thesis really is more scholarly, and it looks like nobody has ever talked about the Sherlock Holmes stories from this angle, so I actually am "creating new knowledge," which is supposedly the point of academic research.  So, yay me!
But still, this has been so much more work than I ever would have expected.  I have never revised anything as much as I have this paper, and I never completely shifted a paper's main point before.  If I've learned anything that's super important about research, it's to really think things through from the very beginning.  I should have done more of that thinking on paper, too, so that I could have gone over that stuff again and again.  It probably would have saved me a lot of time later on.
Here's something I might have used if it had been published more than 5 days ago:

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