Pushing away the extraneous

Just a boring dissertation update, but I have to say that yesterday was a great day! Really great! A dissertation, like any project, is this huge thing and there are so many, many ways to begin and develop it. And of course there are a lot of aspects to this subject and I know that, I know the temptation is there to just try to talk about everything I know! But yesterday, it just got really simple. All of a sudden, I realized a dissertation is not like an essay. In an essay, each paragraph, each section, has to be carefully crafted so that the argument anticipates the next paragraph, the next section. The same train of thought has to be maintained throughout, and the evidence presented in such a way that the reader follows the flow (this anyhow is how I like to do it...wink). So I was thinking the dissertation was like that too, that I had to have each chapter building on the same line of evidence as the one before, so that at the end I got to some magnificent conclusion that no one could disagree with!

But yesterday I realized that is not the case. Each chapter of my dissertation stands on its own, as its own unit, having its own internal argument, its own line of reasoning and evidence. Definitely in the conclusion I will discuss how these chapters interact with one another, but I do not need to worry about that now. I just need to concentrate on one chapter at a time.´

I am not looking for the one theory that explains everything. I am looking to explain a few select facts.

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