Foaming at the Mouth...

First, a little note on my progress. I have a seven-chapter dissertation to write. Here is the breakdown of how much time I anticipate spending on each chapter:

Chapter/ Description/ Percentage of time spent writing and revising
Chapter 1 Introduction 2.5% (draft and first revision finished)
Chapter 2 Lit. Review 30% (it's gonna suck, which is why I'm doing it last)
Chapter 3 Methodology 5% (draft finished and sent off for revisions)
Chapter 4 Participants 2.5% (draft finished and sent off for revisions
Chapter 5 Findings 50% ("this is what I found")
Chapter 6 Interpretations 5% ("um, this is what I think Chapter 5 means")
Chapter 7 Significance 5% (piece of cake)

I am about to begin work on Chapter 5. This chapter is gonna take up most of the dissertation, and it's going to involve a lot of organizational labor. The way I write all my big papers is to record my info on index cards, lay the cards out on the floor, then group and order them like puzzle pieces. Yes, it's old-fashioned (I learned this method in high school) and takes a lot of space and time. However, once everything is ordered, writing is a snap. It's just like I used to tell my students: good writing is 70% planning, 20% revision, and 10% word processing. I made the index cards for research question one (I haven't even started the "recursive process of theme extraction and hierarchical categorization" for Research Question Two...) this Friday night (a little over 200 cards, if you're interested, and yes, that was my exciting Friday night).

To be honest, I am more than a little intimidated by this chapter. I don't have a model for how to write it, and I am totally at sea. I need to see models to get an idea of how this genre works and how to adapt it to my own needs. I've been really anxious about writing this chapter for a while now. Even though it's not the most difficult chapter (that would be the Lit Review), it is a type of writing that I have never practiced before.

To allay some of my anxiety, I decided to look for online dissertation support groups. I figured that everything is on the In-tar-web these days, and so I could find a group of virtual ABDs working with qualitative methods. One would think...but no. I trolled the Internet for hours and couldn't find one that was (a) free, (b) for the humanities/social sciences, and (c) qualitative. Arrgh! What I DID manage to find made me sick:

http://www.ma-dissertations.com/
http://www.customwritings.com/buy-dissertation.html
http://www.masterpapers.com/purchase_dissertation.htm

Apparently, you can BUY a dissertation. I am not naive. I realize that there are lots of companies out there who will ghostwrite papers. I have seen more than a few in my tenure as a high school teacher. I was always able to recognize them and fail the student, no problem (thanks, www.turnitin.com!) I expect some slothful high school students to try and cheat the system. However, it boggles the mind that someone who is ABD would think they could get away with submitting a purchased dissertation! Don't they realize that their diss would be submitted to UMI and made publically available? That whenever someone else stumbled onto it and realized it was plagiarized, their degree would be revoked? We're talking felenious academic conduct, people! How on earth would you expect to get away with that? More to the point, if you don't want to write your own dissertation, why the hell did you go to grad school in the first place?!

Sigh. It makes me weep.

On another note: I got an email from Committee Member 3 this week. He's agreed to meet with me when I go to NYC next week to meet with my advisor. However, the tone of his email was noncommital. I wasn't expecting a detailed critique, but something along the lines of "it look good" or "get ready to scrap 90% of what you've written" or "your methods section is vague" would at least prepare me somewhat. Now I'm stuck worrying that he is going to hate everything I sent. I won't be able to stop worrying about this until I see him.

One final note: I may not have a virtual support group, but I do have people who rock. I call them in a state of panic/frustration/fury/helplessness and they always manage to get me back on track. I love my friends...I just hope they can put up with my whining for another few months...