Why I love 750words.com!

Hey everyone:  Welcome to "I Can't Stop Thinking About My Dissertation All The Time" Land!  Since I have just under two months to get the bulk of the writing finished (with a December 21 deadline), my head is now just constantly berating my inner academic whenever I am "trying" to relax.  I know that any writing teacher can attest to this, but it's not like we can use a Scantron to "grade" our students' writing so we spend a great deal of time trying to write productive and useful feedback to our students in the hope of improving writing skills.  The end result of this?  In my case, at least, I am just plain tired most of the time!

So, given the nature of my job and professional calling, how do I ensure that I spend at least a little bit of my time making sure that I finish that darn dissertation?

Well, I am back to using 750words.com as my motivating "coach" in making me write my dissertation a little at a time each day (I am on a three day streak at the moment!).  I am not sure how exactly but this is working.  This week I am trying to make sure that I get the "Results" chapter 100% done.  So today, I simply made myself sit down for an hour (between classes) and I typed on what the raw data was for essay one (for both of the two classes I studied).  I just simply wrote up what I found being careful to just report the facts and not analyze what I saw (which will be done, of course, in the "Analysis" chapter!).  Well, it worked!  I got this section done and tomorrow I will focus on doing the same thing but this time reporting the "facts" in terms of essay four (I coded data for both a first essay and a fourth essay).