Little Dissertation Matters

I woke up this morning feeling motivated to get back to work. I did read a few interesting books this weekend, but after so much eating and sleeping, I think my body was ready to burn off some calories this morning. Being at the library this morning went by quickly, so I headed back to my "old" spot in the coffeeshop after work to continue the final proof on the diss. I finished going through the hard copy with my pen and the markups from CoChair#1 and Major Field Expert. So starting tomorrow, I can enter those changes into the computer. (Knowing me, I'll probably start today). It looks pretty good. CoChair #1, Major Field Expert, and I, generally speaking, caught different errors, so I feel like the document will be pretty clean. But in the process of doing all that, I realized that I still need to finish writing my acknowledgements and my abstract. I drafted a page of acknowledgements one night when I was really struggling with the diss--it reads like I'm giving an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, so I need to clean it up quite a bit. I don't have anything started on the abstract, and I REALLY hate writing abstracts. It is mostly because it is a writing exercise I don't feel comfortable doing--and I generally feel most comfortable when I'm writing. I guess I feel that as a member of the liberal arts side of my department, I didn't get as much experience in writing abstracts as my social scientific peers. Perhaps that is something I will incorporate more into my teaching--making sure my students get practice in creating abstracts for the research papers they submit. In any event, I'll get on that this week as well so I can just be done--really done--with the diss.