the home stretch.

tla@stav175:~> texcount term/thesis_main.tex
Total words: 32075

The thesis is, with qualifications, done. The qualifications are:

• I wrote the concluding chapter, but skipped the actual concluding paragraphs. Try as I might, I could not think of anything that wasn't trite, clichéd, or just generally horrible. I am going to go to my supervisor and just ask him for advice.


• It is, as you may have observed, too long. I began to cut down chapter 3, but it was a longer job than I expected, and it has become clear that I need to cut way more than I have been cutting. (This is okay though. Chapter 3 is the boring one, mostly because I moved the interesting bits to chapter 4.)


• There is a bunch of cleanup to do, mostly to do with fixing up my citations. There are a couple of places where I need to go look something up again and put an intelligent sentence or two in the thesis.

Oddly, the introduction was not nearly the horror I thought it would be. I wrote all 1400 words in an hour and a half or so. And -- granted, this may change the next time I look at it -- I think it is a good introduction. Me, approving of a piece of my own writing. The hell?

I am going to go lie down now, and try to get that first sentence through my head. It's not there yet.