Draft thesis review

I have finally received the draft thesis review of the work which I submitted at the end of September. This process took much longer than I had expected; inexplicably the review is dated 28 October, but I received it on 4 November, a week later.

The review is detailed, fair and easy to understand - there are no remarks which are wrong or incomprehensible. Unfortunately, it looks like a great deal of work will be required to bring the thesis up to standard. Some of this is due to the fact that portions were written in advance -  parts referring to the actual research were written for the intermediate submission, at which stage the research had yet to take place and so was written in the future tense. This now has to be recast in the past.

Another point mentioned is the the abstract, which was written well before the initial research proposal was written and has remained almost without change. This important part of the thesis does not provide an insights [sic] into what the findings indicate, why these findings are important, and the overall contribution of the research to both academia and practice.

My idea of presenting the data in a 'horizontal' manner (answers from all companies for each question presented together) did not find favour with the reviewer, who wrote it might be more appropriate to present each company separately. I beg to differ; I don't know whether I have to accept everything that the reviewer writes.

I can make an analogy between writing a thesis and making a record. The thesis supervisor is the record producer, who suggests what material should be included and how it should be presented, trying to make it as good as possible. The research committee is comparable to the record company's A&R men (this may be a dying function) who lend what should be an unbiased ear to the product (thesis/record) and make further recommendations. The external examiner is the general public, who decide whether the record sells. According to this analogy, the draft thesis reviewer is equivalent to a music critic, and this is where the analogy breaks down. Musicians rarely listen to critics, but I have to.

Obviously I would like to start work on updating the thesis as soon as possible, but I think that this process is going to have to wait a few days as at the moment I am suffering from a mild viral illness whose major effect is slowing me down to about 50% of my usual pace, making me very weak (and affecting my concentration and spelling as I had written 'weak' as 'week'). It has also given me a tongue canker which mainly makes itself felt when I swallow (because the tongue is pressed to the palate, thus putting pressure on the canker and causing pain). I imagine that this will blow over in a few days; in fact, today already seems better than yesterday: let's say I'm working at 60% capacity.