One of the rules of Academic Writing Month is that you are supposed to discuss what you are doing. I pledged to write a weekly blog post for that reason. This is my first update, which must mean that the first of the four weeks has already gone.
So far I have been using the month as a way to focus my efforts more on my thesis, given the fact that there are so many project things going on this month, and so far I have found it has been working out well. I have now finished checking the transcription of the section of E1 I will be using for the case study in my thesis and I have moved onto transcribing the corresponding section in T. Being so busy with the project, getting ready for the Oxford colloquium this week and the Madrid workshop next week, as well as finishing off translating the online training course into Spanish (no mean feat) has made it difficult to work for more than one hour a day on transcribing for my thesis, but I am sure that the ‘pressure’ of taking part in AcWriMo has helped me make sure that I do actually spend at least an hour per working day on my thesis. It would be so easy to put that on the back burner, which I know I was guilty of in the run-up to the April colloquium, so I would say that so far I am finding the experience useful and beneficial.
I would definitely recommend doing something like AcWriMo to other PhD students who are working as part of larger projects, as I am. The shorter deadlines of project business can make it very tempting to complete project tasks first, particularly with transcription projects such as this one. For example, I have spoken to students on other (non-transcription) projects who dedicate a full day each week to their project and do their thesis for the other four days a week. That way of working would not be practical on a transcription project, as from experience I know that if you try to do too much transcribing on any one day you start to miss things and make more mistakes than you do when you are fresh. For that reason the three PhDs on the Estoria project need to split our days between project and thesis and not let either one take precedent over the other, or take an improportionate length of time. This is one of my biggest hurdles, and is something AcWriMo is helping me be aware of and aim to avoid.