Long haul starts here

Whilst my supervisor looks at re-drafting the paper I have been working on, he suggested I make a start on writing-up my thesis proper. It seems like quite a daunting task if you think of it in terms of writing down every thought of the last 18 months or so in an intelligible, concise form, but fortunately this is not the situation I am facing.

For my annual review, I produced a substantial report, about which I had this to say:

The document that I handed in will, after a discussion with my supervisor, be condensed into a paper, subject to some alterations and some additions that I am currently working on (and more on which in a short while). Thus, far from being only something that is required of me from a departmental point of view, the annual report has been a useful target that will result in roughly 20% of my thesis and the basic foundation of a paper.

The major omission of the report was examples demonstrating how the technique [...] works.

As regular-ish readers will know, condensing the report into a small paper has been the main thrust for the last few weeks. The beauty of it is that — since I'm working towards an MPhil now — the already written report will form something closer to 75% of my final thesis.

That's 55% of thesis goodness in one swoop.

What I'm doing at the moment, then, is taking some of the experience I have gained whilst writing the paper and making the original annual report better — both mathematically and from a writing point of view. I've also got a couple of examples already completed to fit into the thesis, as well as some restructuring to perform.

Overall, though, writing-up (hopefully) won't be quite the mountain to climb it can be and for that I am somewhat relieved.

Note that next week may see the return of a guest diarist, depending on other, real world commitments. If that is the case, I'll post a heads-up and a subsequent introduction later on this week.