My confirmation of candidature report is currently 2800 words over the limit. It’s going to go up before it comes back down again!

I will be able to cut a reasonable amount from the method section but I also have to add more in around how I’m going to analyse my data. It might end up balancing out in the end. I think I am in a bad habit of talking about qualitative data in a very brief way. To save words I often do not say any more than “the data was then thematically analysed using… blah blah!!!” So a little more detail is going to be needed this time around!

The other things that need to be done are really “bits and pieces”. For example I am going to need some help with the budget which needs to be included. I am doing email interviews so no transcription is required. That will save some money indeed! But then maybe I can spend most of the budget on conferences which would be great. If I don’t have to pay for the conference, just the accommodation I could potentially go to both the yearly conferences I would really like to go to. One is the AARE (Education research) and the other is the NAEEA (Enabling). This year they are both in Adelaide. I’m not actually sure where they might be next year… and I wouldn’t be presenting any PhD related things until then. Still, I don’t really care where they are… would just like to go!

The confirmation report is now at that tough point for me. There is no more discoveries, no learning from here on in. It’s just editing and proofreading. It’s laborious, tedious and some other “ious”s probably too. It’s the hard work part, probably the only part I find hard work about writing. Happy to admit that. I dislike this part a lot. It takes more self-motivation that I would like. Lucky for me I’ve been blessed with a pretty good work ethic and I can mostly just jump in and get it done. If I ever do procrastinate THIS is around the time that I do!

Speaking of which – I should have done a couple of hours on it today and instead I just reformatted the timeline and then looked at potentially submitting an abstract for another book chapter! A follow-on from the sense of belonging discussion piece that I wrote with Trixie. What’s one more publication/project? 🙂