![]() ![]() Major revisions usually requires returning to ‘clean’ or ‘good’ draft stages for sections of the work and then getting it back up to ‘submittable’ (might take 6 months).Ī complete rewrite (up to 12 months) will mean returning to ‘clean’ or ‘good’ drafts stages for much or most of the thesis.Īfter peer review, possibly multiple rounds, plus further edits and copy editing rounds, plus professional typesetting, the work is suitable to be published in a scholarly journal or book. Minor revisions: usually means going back to the ‘submittable’ stage and doing further small corrections (up to 3 months, but may only take one day!) When it’s worth a PhD, possibly after a further round of revisions. ![]() Does that mean your revisions are done? (Possibly not!) If your ‘good’ or ‘submittable’ draft needs to incorporate significant new material or do major restructuring, you will probably have to go back to Clean, Good and Submittable draft stages, again. You can also present this work at a progress hurdle meeting. You can hand this in for examination or for peer review. You should expect to need to do further tightening, rephrasing, clarifying, formatting, error checking etc. Having got extensive feedback and had some time to get some critical distance from the work, you go back and work on it some more. The draft is now tightened up, extraneous matter cut phrasing is effective, the words are good words the introduction is powerful and the conclusion strong, the argument builds convincingly figures and text nicely formatted, every aspect of the correct scholarly style (APA, Chicago etc) is checked against the guide the title and subtitle are now both attractive and descriptive. This is often the right stage to share with collaborators or to send to supervisors to show your working. Never show anyone your writing before this stage-and for picky supervisors who get caught up in minute issues of style, probably not even then. All the bibliographic entries and references are correct. You are pretty much at the word count, errors corrected, the whole draft is tidied up, structure is logical and signposted. This is the stage you will almost always be in your word processing software (Word, Scrivener or LateX), and you should start using your bibliographic software systematically here. To get from point 2 or 3, you will typically have to do quite a bit of rewriting. They are still only a starting point and will need significant rewriting!Ī rough draft is almost the whole word count, all the sections are there but not necessarily in the right order spelling, grammar and style issues still present footnotes probably still messy. Unfortunately the fact that the work was passable and went through so many drafts doesn’t mean you can skip straight to a good draft in its new form. Lots of people start with a conference paper, a poster presentation, a lecture, or try to turn a thesis chapter into an article (as Wendy Belcher recommends in her book Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks). Sometimes this draft shows your plan or concept isn’t going to work, or there are significant issues with your ideas and research, so you may need to discard a couple of these before you get text that is worth taking to the next level. You might type into a notes app, speak into voice recognition software, record yourself, write by hand, type into your phone-or do a mixture. ![]() ![]() This draft is often not done into your Word Processor. There are some words on a page, more of the word count than less, and there is most of a beginning, much of a middle and some of the end in it you know what is missing and can work out how to fill it in. First shitty draft (also called a ‘zero draft’ ).Reading, note taking, conceptualising, understanding, talking about it with your supervisor, doing experiments or case studies, problem solving, planning. Consider this a typology rather than an exact blueprint that you must follow to do good work! In this post, I talk about a typical draft process, for me and for other people I write with and work with. There are no right answers here, but the true answer to the question ‘how many drafts should I expect to write’ is ‘probably more than you think!’ ![]()
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