Writing about meta-writing simultaneously
I am currently in the middle of the process of writing my thesis dissertation. It is a very interesting experience, at times I am enthusiastic about it and at times I feel overwhelmed by it. One thing is clear though, after having written a document of hundreds of pages, one will have developed a methodology. Today I was tinking about two of the practices that I like in my methodology:
1. Use vi. The efficiency that it gives you when writing (especially latex) is out of this Word-ish :)
2. Write and meta-write about a chapter simultaneously. While I have my chapter open in front of me, I also have another document open which is the document about that chapter. Every time I some idea that passes through my head that I would like to pursue further in this chapter, I write it in the meta-chapter document. I write test paragraphs in the meta-chapter: if I like them i put them in the chapter, or I leave them for later; if i don’t like them it’s easier to delete them, they were never part of the thesis anyway :) If later I will be writing a different chapter, or when I will be reading some paper, and I will have an idea about this chapter, I will dump it here, and come back to it later. The main goal: download as fast as possible ideas from my head :)