The never-ending thesis

I started working on my thesis last fall. I realize that 10 months isn't really that long to be working on a thesis, but it feels like it sometimes! It's at the point that when I edit any of it, I don't really see what's on the page anymore. I don't even see what I think it might be when it's finished. I see what I feel like it should be now. (Which, to my mind, is a flawless page-turner of an essay. Oops! I thought I had gotten rid of my academic perfectionism in college. Oh well. In this case, I think a B might really not be good enough for me.)

So anyway, I got preliminary comments back from one of my readers with some basic changes I needed to make to improve the quality of my argument. Essentially, I messed up the transcriptions of most of the diphthongs and needed to make a few quick & easy changes to fix it. Whew! I'm glad he caught it, because I never would have seen the errors. I've been working on this thesis--and all the little parts that make it up--for long enough now that I even when I see something that's a glaring error, it looks correct. It's like if you rehearse a piece of music (or a line in a play, or whatever) with a small mistake in it, you get to a point that the mistake is what feels correct, even though it's not what you're supposed to be saying.

Anyway, I'm really glad to be in the final stages of my thesis!