Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Revising fun

Crap.

My plans for today were to spend the morning doing penultimate revisions on the conference paper that's due mid-month (but that I'd like to get out by early next week, just to get it off my desk), and then spend the afternoon working on an entirely different project. This, of course, was assuming that the conference paper was in pretty-close-to-finished format already, and that the revisions would be fairly minor: clarifying arguments, filling in details or missing citations, beefing up the discussion section, etc.

I just finished reading through the draft, and it is a MESS! I'm not sure why I remember this paper being so close to being finished, because frankly it is just all over the map. The good nuggets are in there, and I think the paper even has a point in there somewhere, but the organization is UGLY and makes absolutely no sense. Plus, there's a lot of extraneous stuff that was obviously pasted from other papers and doesn't belong. And did I mention that the paper is about 5 pages too long?

So now I'll be spending this afternoon doing some major surgery on this paper. After reading through it, I still don't have a crystal-clear idea of how it should be organized, but I have one possible way that I will try. (Any organization is better than what's there now!) At least the results section is halfway decent; most of the major work will be on the motivation and algorithm sections, which are the weakest and the worst right now.

I think I can still get it out by early next week, though. So that's the one bright spot this morning.

Isn't revising fun???

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That happened to me last month and it sent me into an emotional tailspin for two weeks, so I congratulate you on not letting this set you back by too much. Good luck with it!

Jane said...

Well, I did get so frustrated and disgusted at one point that I gave up and took a nap. :) But I agree, it is hard to not let setbacks like this get to you.

(hope you're back on track now!)

Chaser said...

This happens to me all the time!

Anonymous said...

I have some major surgery to do on a piece of my own, and I'm dreading it so much that I'm being incredibly productive on other projects out of sheer avoidance! So that's the bright side, but this thing is due in three weeks, so I really need to face the music (to change metaphors here).

Congrats on forging ahead with the difficult task.

Jane said...

Chaser and WhatNow, I'm so glad to hear that others go through this too! Revising Hell can be a lonely, lonely place....

Working on this article is much, much easier today, though. It's still not great, but at least I'm feeling less fatalistic about it.