The best news this week! The ro…

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Nov 112006
 

The best news this week!

The rough draft of the first draft is done!

Tomorrow I have to edit it, perhaps reword things, as well as finish my bibliography and see if I can track down a couple extra sources to verify a few things (it never hurts to be too careful), but for the most part, the paper is done.

Of course, I have a first draft of a paper of almost equal length, this time on the historiography of the origins of the First World War, due in two weeks. But I’m trying not to think about that one so much.

After my spending my first break…

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Nov 092006
 

After my spending my first break at work doing nothing but editing the various styles in the document until they were all set to “auto-update” (which doesn’t actually do anything) and “add to template”, I finally, finally, got the document to stop changing its font to Verdana and its footnotes to random formatting.

I am 9/10s of the way through the labor meetings in Lancashire, and I’m just over halfway done with the paper itself. My first draft is due Monday, and that’s no longer looking nearly as terrifying.

Oh my fucking god. I’m a third d…

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Nov 082006
 

Oh my fucking god. I’m a third done with my paper, got all the way through the labor press tonight, but Word has never given me this many problems before. I am about to pull my fucking hair out. Here’s a list of the problems it’s given me tonight:

  1. Refused to let me do a single indent. It would let me do none, two, three, four, etc. But not one. Had to close word and start over.
  2. Defaulted footnote text to 12 point Verdana. (should be 10 point Times New Roman) I have never used Verdana in an academic document in my life.
  3. Defaulted body text to 10 point Verdana. (should be 12 point Times New Roman) I have never used Verdana in an academic document in my life.
  4. Replaced all “Footnote Text” formatting with “Footer” formatting, at random, so that all new footnotes are misaligned with the older footnotes. I can convert new footnotes to “Footer” formatting, but it refuses to convert any footnote back to “Footnote Text”
  5. Closed the document and reopened to have all footnotes, which were in Times New Roman 10 point when closed, be converted to Verdana 10 point. I have never used Verdana in an academic document in my life.

Fucking. A.

A bit more progress done. I’m th…

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Nov 072006
 

A bit more progress done. I’m through with Palmerston and Gladstone, other than what I plan to touch-up during work tomorrow. Tomorrow night I plan to start working on the general thoughts of the labor movements at the time, like the rallies and such. My paper still feels a bit confused, but I think I’ll be able to stream line it. My main confusion is still with the “research versus historiography” problem I’m having conceptually.

Google Docs (formerly Writely) is something I’d played around with before, but when I started work on this paper in exile I figured I’d see how it did on something larger than a note. Long story short, it fucking sucks ass. I’m sure this has all been written about before, but this was my first attempt at using it as a real word processor. Why can’t I set margins on pages? Let’s not get started on footnotes. My original plan was to upload my work to Google Docs so I could make a few quick changes if I needed to while keeping an online backup. But since it seems to have a vendetta against intelligent formatting, it’s back to uploading a backup to Jux and keeping my thumb drive handy at work.

On a vaguely related note, I finally picked up my GSU id (“Panther Card”) today. That means I can stop doing all of my database research through my alumni KSU account and actually use the library of my current home institution! Huzzah!

I was supposed to get at least 1…

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Nov 062006
 

I was supposed to get at least 10 pages of my seminar paper done by now. Instead, I’ve done two. But, I’ve decided to write it like I wrote my senior thesis, and do it in chapter sections. Tomorrow I’m doing the entire section on the British elites (Gladstone, Palmerston) during the American Civil War. Following that I’m going to do the Labor papers, Labor meetings, and the American responses to the plight of Lancashire.

What’s due next Monday is actually just the first draft, but I will be graded on it, so it’s still important. After that I have the first draft of a paper I’ve not even actually started on due the Monday after Thanksgiving. But, since that’s a historiography paper rather than a true research project, it’s much simpler to write.

I actually dislike writing historiography papers usually, but I’ve had to do so many this semester that my British Perceptions in the American Civil War research paper is actually going to be part historiography, because that’s just the style of writing and research I’m doing right now. I guess I’m getting used to it. It definitely adds something to my more comfortable research writing, but I still dislike doing pure historiography, and I hope to get away from it next semester.

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