First Vision of Chapter 3, August 18
After a long break to participate in a conference and suffer generally from paralyzing anxiety, I'm back to writing.
My anxieties are numerous: I read too slow, I don't work hard enough, I'm not very good at abstract, syncretic thinking. But all of these weaknesses are ones that I can and should be working on. And I am, I think. It is very disappointing to see how little I accomplished this summer, but the only thing to be done, I suppose, is push on, and work harder.
My committee members were very disappointed with my writing, I think, and with good reason. The greatest weakness is that I presented little to no critical voice, and instead presumed to simply channel the voice of Yang Jiang -- this, of course, does not count for much academically. To fix the problem, I decided I needed to write a "treatment" of how the chapter would go and what it would accomplish. It turns out I had already written this "treatment" ; it's called a "prospectus." How stupid I was to have forgotten and ignored my own old writing!
Still, the new "treatment" is considerably more detailed and more sophisticated than the old "treatment." So there is that. And more importantly, this "treatment" ought to serve as a map for the rest of the chapter.
Time to get writing!
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