Post #11

I cannot believe that the semester is almost over. I began the semester having only a vague idea of the author I wanted to write my thesis on. As the semester progressed, I’ve slowly but surely molded the vague idea into something more concrete. I was very surprised with myself and my progress over the Thanksgiving holiday; I actually spent some time going over my prospectus and making some changes. This alarming behavior of not putting work off until the last minute probably stems from the fact that I needed a small break from the family by Friday afternoon, and schoolwork is a very convenient excuse! I hope that this momentum that I have picked up during this Thanksgiving holiday will carry over into the Christmas Break and all throughout the Spring semester. I know that is a slightly unrealistic goal, but if I capitalize on similar bouts of momentum when they presents themselves, I maybe can get this thesis done in the end after all.
Finally turning in the prospectus will be a extremely harrowing experience. I have already looked over it dozens of times in the past couple of weeks, and I’ve moved from making large changes in sentence structure and overall ideas to obsessively tweaking word choice and debating over the use of commas. But eventually, I must let the prospectus go and STOP LOOKING AT IT. If I am having trouble with knowing when to stop with my prospectus, which is just the preliminary proposal of my thesis, I do not even want to imagine how I will feel when my thesis is done and I’m in the editing phase. However, I imagine one of the roles my adviser will play is to help me to realize when my thesis is truly done and when it is ready for submission.

Post #10

Editing has never been my strong point. Now, I do not mean that I've had difficulty making sure my subjects and verbs agree or that I am a repeat comma splice offender. I am certainly not a perfect grammarian, but a couple of read-throughs of an important paper allows me to catch any major errors that might be distracting to the reader of my paper. I find myself having difficulty with editing when I am asked to go back through the ideas that I have already committed to paper and discard those that do not make sense or are not relevant to my argument.

I naturally encountered this problem when drafting my tentative prospectus. When writing each of the four sections we had to submit for peer review, I tried to include as much information as possible. I did this in order to make sure I had any information necessary to my project located in one place (so I would not forget it or lose it amongst the shuffle of the dozens of other articles) and also in hopes that providing more information than necessary would make the ideas behind and goals of the project more understandable to a reader who had not read Salinger since Catcher in the Rye in high school. As I returned to the separate parts of the essay and attempted to re-write them as a whole, I specifically tried to keep from retreading already stated information and attempted to create a prospectus and thesis that, while including pertinent information, did not repeat themselves or inundate reader with extraneous information. I probably was not as successful as I might have hoped at this task, but I hope that it creates a more cohesive picture of what I intend to do than each of the separate parts did.

Post #9

Writing the methodology section of my prospectus was one of the most difficult parts, if not the most difficult part, of this drafting process so far. I initially felt as if my methodology could be summed up in one or two sentences. Simply, I’m using two different Salinger archetypes of children and comparing and contrasting Salinger’s children in “The Laughing Man” with two representative children found in “For Esme--With Love and Squalor” and “Teddy.” Composing methodologies for psychology or biology papers involves long descriptions of experimental conditions, subject breakdowns, and methods used to conduct the experiment. This could take up many paragraphs and pages of a lab report. How much really could I stretch out that my sentence? Everything I want to say about what I'm doing, I can do clearly and concisely in one or two sentences. I think I’m fairly talented at expanding upon an idea, but this exercise would test my abilities. However, as I kept staring at my computer and then began writing, I realized that it might be necessary to explain a little bit more about these types of children, how they are used, specific places where they can be found, and other examples. I should also define specific terms that I plan on using throughout my paper. To truly understand what I’m hoping to do in the essay, I need to fully understand these aspects of childhood and the three short stories I’m using and so does the reader. I feel a little wary about the fact that I may be repeating myself, and too much of the information found in my introduction or literature review is repeated in my methodology. Once I begin to piece together each of these sections to form a complete prospectus, I will certainly have to do some editing to eliminate overlap. However, I think my methodology will be most effective condensed into one or two paragraphs, as opposed to sprinkled throughout the prospectus.