" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

Well? Do ya punk?

When I started writ­ing this post, I didn’t feel pro­duc­tive or lucky. I just felt behind, like I ALWAYS feel. I also felt a lit­tle angry, despite rais­ing the stakes of dis­ser­ta­tion com­ple­tion, I’m not really push­ing along any faster. My word surge at the begin­ning of AcBoW­riMo is begin­ning to look increas­ingly like a coin­ci­dence rather than the result of an out­spo­ken oblig­a­tion. A few folks have dis­cussed AcBoW­riMo as being as much about tim­ing as it is pro­duc­tiv­ity. You have to be ready to out­put words, it doesn’t just hap­pen because you’ll say it will hap­pen. Productivity-wise I was pretty pro­duc­tive today: I revised my chap­ters in a more pro­duc­tive man­ner, using the chore­og­ra­phy method in Help­ing Doc­toral Stu­dents Write, (p. 92), I did some read­ing, and I added another 677 new words.

I think the prob­lem with dis­ser­ta­tion writ­ing is that so much of the work is not mea­sur­able. I met with my diss advi­sor early this fall, and she told me she feels like I’m in the same place as I was a year ago. I’ve done a ton of work since then, but it’s all research frag­ments, read­ing, and pro­cess­ing. I want to think that this work is cru­cial to fin­ish­ing, but it doesn’t feel val­ued by my advi­sor or insti­tu­tions at large. So how do we mea­sure progress in the process of writ­ing the dis­ser­ta­tion when so much of it isn’t fluid writ­ing yet?