I'll start with a small embarrassed cough. *ahem*.It's only been three months since my last post, I don't know what you're talking about. Although since everyone who speaks at our first year DPhil seminars keeps telling us that we ought to be writing 500 words a day about our research, it is a little embarrassing.
Speaking of embarrassing, so is being on a conference committee and being very lax in getting your abstract submitted. The deadline is about six hours from now, and I just managed to get it in, some weeks after the original call for papers. One of the problems of writing an abstract for a paper you intend to give is that although you may have some idea about what you're going to say, it's not all fully formed yet. An abstract can give you some ideas, but it can also tie you down once you've been accepted and have to sit down and actually write the whole damn paper.
Being a first year, I don't have any results (or indeed any anything) yet, so what's the point of giving a paper at a conference? Well, firstly, this is a student conference, designed to help us develop our presentation skills, get feedback on both them and our projects, and also to practice submitting abstracts for consideration. The abstract is blind peer reviewed, which is also a nice piece of professional development. For this conference, STORIES (STudents' Ongoing Research In Education Studies), the abstract length was only 150 words, but even that much was leaving me with serious writers' block. I'd taken the advice of a second year, and decided to present on potential methodologies for my study. But that was as far as it went.
Luckily that second year had some more tips: a secret formula lightly mentioned in passing by her supervisor. The recipe is as follows:
Speaking of embarrassing, so is being on a conference committee and being very lax in getting your abstract submitted. The deadline is about six hours from now, and I just managed to get it in, some weeks after the original call for papers. One of the problems of writing an abstract for a paper you intend to give is that although you may have some idea about what you're going to say, it's not all fully formed yet. An abstract can give you some ideas, but it can also tie you down once you've been accepted and have to sit down and actually write the whole damn paper.
Being a first year, I don't have any results (or indeed any anything) yet, so what's the point of giving a paper at a conference? Well, firstly, this is a student conference, designed to help us develop our presentation skills, get feedback on both them and our projects, and also to practice submitting abstracts for consideration. The abstract is blind peer reviewed, which is also a nice piece of professional development. For this conference, STORIES (STudents' Ongoing Research In Education Studies), the abstract length was only 150 words, but even that much was leaving me with serious writers' block. I'd taken the advice of a second year, and decided to present on potential methodologies for my study. But that was as far as it went.
Luckily that second year had some more tips: a secret formula lightly mentioned in passing by her supervisor. The recipe is as follows:
- First paragraph = introduce the topic
- Second paragraph = introduce the problem
- Third paragraph = say what you're actually going to talk about
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