Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Text is a battlefield

I have spent a week of evenings trying to impose order upon this section on the measurement of post-reproductive survival. The document is littered with dead and broken bits of cast away paragraphs, sentence fragments, disembodied equations, references to tables that don't yet exist and citations of papers I remember reading a long time ago but need to check what they actually say. Multiple passages providing identical information vie to eliminate each other. Clean up is going to be long and ugly. Some concepts that don't make it will be scavenged for other papers. Others, too badly broken, will simply be left for dead.

After all this textual carnage, I finally have a good idea of how to ram all my multi-dimensional conceptual links into a single linear string of text. I even have most of it there. If I pretend I have a year more to finish than I actually do, I feel like I am making great progress, and greatly enjoying it.

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