It’s taken me about a year to reach this point but I finally completed and submitted to my chair a draft of chapter 2, the literature review. It’s pretty solid but it’s still a draft.
- There are a handful of places that I know I could expand but I’ll wait until I hear back from my chair before doing that.
- I need to add a couple of new sources to the digital divide section but nothing significant and nothing worth delaying this draft any longer.
- I think that I need to add a brief section – to this chapter or another one – summarizing the assumptions of the study. Several of them are spread throughout the lit review where I discuss and justify them but it seems that it would be more organized if I would summarize them all in one place.
Why did this take so long? I don’t know. It’s certainly not because I struggle with this kind of writing. It’s definitely not because I don’t know what I want or need to write. I imagine that it has to be some kind of emotional block, some sort of fear of failure perhaps. That is completely uncharacteristic of me but it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Why did I finally buckle down and get this draft completed? The shame of not having done this yet became overwhelming and I simply had to finish this so I could look my chair in the eye. I am also running out of time; I’m already behind where I wanted to be right now and hitting the job market ABD. I’m not very pleased to be on the market as an ABD but now my energy needs to be focused on making as much progress as possible before I land a job because the more progress I have the better the odds that I’ll finish.