I am working (read: struggling) through writing my thesis proposal. In theory, it shouldn’t be as difficult as it currently is. I have five sections that I need to write on over the span of 7,500 words; problematic, hypothesis, justification of corpus, state of the question (lit review) and theoretical framework/methodology. Simple enough – as a Sociologist, almost everything I have ever written follows this structure. However, what I am struggling with is trying to write each section as discreet units. When I submitted (what I thought was) my problematic, my advisor came back to me and said that what I had, in fact, was a short (5 page) proposal that included all the above-mentioned sections (albeit very briefly). I found it strange, since in my head (a scary place to be sometimes) it was really just my problematic. As I started to take out each section and paste them into separate word docs, I realized that I couldn’t say something without contextualizing it from the get-go. So, my original problematic was peppered with references, methods and hypothesis’.
Now that I have acknowledged what I was doing ‘wrong’, I am hoping that I can chalk it up to being part of the process. A process that is slightly different than the one I have been working with for the last several years. By acknowledging that I am working with a new process, hopefully it will help unclog the mental block that has been hindering my proposal progress.
kellyboudreauphd.ca 