Word Count Versus Progress in Thesis Land
I’ve been wearing my thesis hat a good deal through October, because there’s an official deadline to get an exegesis draft finished by November 30. It’s gotta be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words. My impulse is to aim for the middle, assuming some stuff is going in ’cause I missed it while I will pull out other things ’cause they don’t need to be there. Meanwhile my supervisor stresses that I’ve met university requirements so long as the exegesis clocks in at 20,001, and pointedly suggests that that minimum viable length will be just fine given that I’m submitting next year. My draft currently sits around 18,616 words, so I’m doing okay on the productivity front, but it’s also a stark reminder that there’s a big difference between word count and progress. It looks like I’m almost done on the surface, but the stuff that’s actually “rough draft” only makes up 11,519 words of it. The rest is all
