Thesis update

I last wrote on this topic just over two weeks ago. It took me more than a few days to start work on revising the thesis following the review, as the mild viral infection was replaced by several migraines. The last ten days have been very windy and very dry and these seem to be ideal conditions for migraines. I made a doctor's appointment for last Sunday: she checked me out, but everything seemed to be ok. The only way to get through the migraines is to take the pain killing pills as soon as possible and to grin and bear it. Today has been fine.

I had a chat with my supervisor on Monday when we went over the review. The most important thing for me to find out was the degree to which I have to follow the reviewer's comments. I quite agree with some of his comments but strongly disagree with other comments. "That's fine", says my supervisor, "as long as you explain why you have chosen to present the material in its current format".

Last weekend I spent some time on the first chapter, moving certain topics out into the literature review, throwing out one section which seemed unnecessary, and moving other sections around in the chapter. To continue my music analogy, I was 'playing with the arrangement' in order to achieve a better flow.

This was emphasized by the supervisor: structure the material as if you are telling a story - and not in the post-modernist style of having flashbacks and flash-forwards in order to complicate matters for the reader. The goal is simplicity combined with explanations.

Part of my problem is that the introductory chapter was based on my original research proposal, which is supposed to be based on literature references with little personal input. If the main question of the reader now is "why (are you telling me this)?", then the original question was "who says?". But now I can write unfettered from these demands. So I added at least another page if not more to the introduction, explaining why the research is important; also, what is novel and what is original.

An idea crept into my mind whilst walking the dog at 4:40 am the other morning; this material found its way into the introduction, contributing almost another page. Then I had an idea for the introduction to the literature review.

This section began with a perfunctory paragraph stating which topics would be covered along with the vanilla statement that these topics were chosen as they are relevant both to the use of ERP in SMEs, and to the management of ERP enhancements. My idea was to replace this with a paragraph on each topic in the literature review, explaining at length why each one was included. Some were marked as being background material and one was took a leaf out of textbooks by being marked as 'one can skip this material on first reading'. Two simple paragraphs were replaced by two pages of meaningful material.

This is what I want to continue doing throughout the rest of the thesis.