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 random bits, theoretical chunks of a larger jigsaw where I still searching out the edge pieces. Short pieces that may or may not fit into the overall thesis structure, written out of order and frequently trying to lock down a particular idea or argument. It’s valuable to have them, but they won’t make sense if someone asks to read where my research is at.

A few months back, when I started this process, those segments counted as good progress. They were how I got the computer every morning and started typing new words. Doing everything I could to avoid starting with a blank page.

You can rack up a pretty good wordcount that way, but it takes more than that to become a narrative (and an exegesis is a narrative, telling the story of your research and process as you solve a particular problem).Those notes got me to the point where where I could start linking things up and figuring out what chapters should look like, effectively moving me out of first gear and getting on the highway.

The core of progress is always word count, but the type of wordcount that counts as progress is likely to shift across the lifespan of a project. I’m still locking down ideas and rough notes at this late stage, but they tend to be part of a daily braindump into a diary rather than occurring on the page.