Starting this PhD
is for me like getting a package in the mail, probably one filled
with apple trees, and thus covered with quarantine labels, heavy duty
tape, and straps; along with the presence of sundry icons across the
package providing somewhat conflicting advice as to which end is up,
and where I should open it. I have the certainty that something good
is inside, I just fear ruining it by opening it the wrong way.
There are several
things you might conclude from this prologue:
I am weak at
sentence and paragraph structure, and just may be the most
appalling PhD student ever have an enormous potential to
improve.
I think the
conventional way to do a PhD is to draft up the chapters, then start
writing, and then after some tens of thousands of words; begin
revising. That seems a little incongruous to my natural inclinations,
so I'm going to apply the same formula to my PhD that was used for
the unit I'm currently finishing through Coursera, Fantasy and Science Fiction:The Human Mind, Our Modern World by Professor Eric Rabkin from the University of Michigan, which required
one 270-320 word essay every week, though I've decided to bump the
word count up by 50 words to a wordcount of 320-370, to allow me
some extra room to provide evidence to my argument. Assuming this PhD
takes 4 years (given that for this year at least I'll be part-time),
and assuming that I write an average of 345 words a week, that's 71,
760 words. Which will allow me some left-over words with which to
connect these piecemeal parts out, and all the extra words that seem
to sneak in during the revision process.
Having a solid
structure to this thing doubtlessly will allow me to unpack my
argument with a little more direction. The working title is Virtual
Habitats and the Value of Nature: Is there a value to
digital habitat dioramas? And I'll be explaining a little more
what it's about every week.
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