Thursday, November 29, 2007

Progress

I'm tired of counting words. It's getting complicated. I'm at 49% and you think I could not give up and count enough to make it to 50% but I'm done. With that said, I am really happy with my progress this past month. I didn't make the exact goals I had hoped for but I've gotten a lot of writing done, most of it revisions which makes counting difficult.
I've actually done a lot of work putting together my dissertation which I didn't think I'd start until January, but since I'm waiting for other people on my publications I thought I might as well do some of it (since I needed to increase my word count). I'd like to show my outline here and mention how much I've done (to pat myself on my back). The outline was only written in October.

Ch. 1 INTRODUCTION (isn't it always).
This is finished! Granted some was cut and pasted from manuscripts I'm working on and/or edited from my masters thesis but still. It is five pages and has three sections. It could likely be longer but each individual chapter will have have an intro. so this is just basic info and you know the summary about what the dissertation is about. The first section is background info about the hydrogeology of the study area. The second two sections are info about the two major groundwater contaminants I work with, so heath impacts, sources of contamination, ect. You can always put in more info about other peoples work but I feel like I've summarized pretty good and included the major review papers.
Ch 2. Contaminant #1
This has four subsections, three of which are going to be publications. So once those are done I'll cut and paste and format into dissertation. The last subsection I've written this past week. I didn't think it was going to be enough data for a manuscript but now that I've written it up I'm thinking it could be. It's only the second data set of it's kind on this contaminant so I think it deserves to get out there. But I'll wait until the other papers have been submitted and then think about it again.
Ch 3. Major chemistry of contaminant #1 and #2 sources.
This is more of an appendix style chapter. I've written the text, it's about a page, and will make the tables once the last of the data comes in. Part of this is the manuscript I'm resubmitting. So I refer to it but again this is more of a look at all this data, maybe somebody later can use it in a different way than I have, and most of the data has been interpreted in other sections.
Ch 4. About contaminant #2
I wrote the text for this today up until the results section. That's when things get hard :) This is a continuation of my master's thesis. Where the masters had a years worth of data this is four years of data, plus some changes to the study sites, so new data. It's really interested but maybe not publishable since I've been told it's only important locally and doesn't have a broad impact. Most of this data analysis has been done for abstracts but I need to think about it again and organize my thoughts better before I write the results and discussion. I will likely try to submit it once life has settled. There is a local journal I submitted the master's thesis data to.

Ok, then there is a nice conclusion/summary chapter and of course the abstract of the dissertation. These are things that will be completed last so they aren't on the radar yet.

I feel great. Thanks InaDWriMo.

1 comment:

EcoGeoFemme said...

Awesome. It's great when you can review and enjoy your accomplishments rather than always feeling like you aren't doing enough. yay!