Rather than what I have learnt through the feedback, I would like to reflect on two mental notes I made to myself while actually writing the assignment – and I only did one, so it shouldn’t have been that strenuous a task really. There were moments though when it felt as if I was climbing Everest – the bit near the top where the oxygen levels are low and therefore the climbing is even harder!<\/p>\n
So my first mental note was\u00a0NEVER, EVER, EVER<\/strong> work backwards again!<\/p>\n I think that between working out what data collection methods I wanted to trial and talking to my supervisor, where the ideas were bounced around and developed, \u00a0I somehow lost the plot of why I was doing what I was doing. I knew what<\/em> I was doing, but had lost track of the why<\/em> (which probably wasn’t very well formed to start with), particularly with regards to the ‘gap in the literature’ that I was trying to respond to (which I actually never had anyway). This resulted in two or three weeks of frantic searching for that ‘gap’ after<\/em> I had collected my data. After several attempts where I felt I was manipulating the gap towards my data collection tools and writing stuff that I really wasn’t happy with, I decided to start with the data, rewrite the research questions and fortunately, eventually, \u00a0the gap followed from that. I have vowed to myself never to work like this again, mainly because of the stress levels it induced, but also because I don’t think it is the best way to go about research. Why I am doing it, how it fits within the literature and the RQs are the key starting point. I think I need to stick that on my wall as a sort of mantra.<\/p>\n The second was a reminder to myself that the whole writing process is hard work and time consuming and that fact shouldn’t take me by surprise every time I start a new piece of work. Just because the last one worked out OK, doesn’t mean that the next will just flow out as an almost finished product immediately. I need to remember that the last one went through the same birthing experience that this one will need to go through. There was lots of drafting, re-drafting, re-structuring etc. until I had something that I was happy with and seemed to make up a coherent whole. Another mantra for the wall perhaps.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rather than what I have learnt through the feedback, I would like to reflect on two mental notes I made to myself while actually writing the assignment – and I only did one, so it shouldn’t have been that strenuous a task really. There were moments though when it felt as if I was climbing Everest – the bit near […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[14,16],"tags":[65,72,162,226],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p865eh-1vl","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}