Friday, December 01, 2006

InaDWriMo: the conclusion

November has ended. Endily. Like a big endy thing.*

Which means it's time to see how all our academic writers have fared.

A few people seem to have gone missing in action, and I couldn't find any word counts for Anastasia, Peri, Bobita, Propter Doc (whose archives I can't get to, either, although I know she was doing well last time I checked), nor a book-count for Maryanne's spin-off reading plan.

Dino's entire blog seems to have disappeared. I hope she's okay.

New Kid on the Hallway, who has been posting her word counts on her research blog Learn by Going, seems to have been very productive, but I couldn't work out exactly what that meant in terms of a word count since some days she posts the number of pages written, and other days words. Also, I would have had to add together all her daily counts for November and I'm too lazy for that.

So that just leaves Dr Brazen Hussy, Twirly, Weezy and me.

Dr Brazen Hussy has no doubt written more than I can work out, but her sidebar word-o-meters seem to be a mixture of word and page counts. Or possibly entire documents. Unless she truly is writing 18-word and 5-word reviews (wouldn't that be awesome?) Anyway, the words that I can add up make 11330. And she is planning to keep going on this into December as well.

Twirly has written 87 pages of her proposal. By my calculations, that's at least 26000 words! Well done, Twirly!

Weezy has written 21748 words, according to the word-count meters in her side-bar. I vaguely remember them not being completely empty at the start of November, so maybe it wasn't all written during InaDWriMo, but all the same, she's been very productive.

And now for the bit where I talk about myself. (I love this part.) I have written 39484 words**. Not the 45000 I was aiming for, but close enough to make me happy.*** And I totally could have made it, except for the fact that sometime around Monday evening I said fuck it, and proceeded to spend the entire rest of the week doing nothing but taking photos of parrots and trying to look busy while surfing the net. Bad StyleyGeek. I think the moral of the story is that even if you think you need to catch up a little, a writing binge of 6000 words in 48 hours is going to make you never want to look at your dissertation again. It's just not worth it.

The end.

______

* See the impressive padding strategies my writing has developed during the last month?

** Because I am a big overachiever.

*** Notice how I am carefully avoiding pointing out that I wrote nearly TWICE as much as any of the rest of you, ha ha ha, aren't I clever? The reason I'm not mentioning that is in case you comment to say that you have all had infinitely more teaching responsibilities than me and the only thing I've had to do all November was sit on my arse and write. And you would be right to point this out. And I am feeling guilty about it already.

8 Comments:

Lucy said...

Congratulations, you big overachiever :)

And congratulations to all the others, who did infinitely more than me in the past month!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, well, some days I was writing (word count), other days I was editing (pages count). So I'm inconsistent. :-) Congrats on all your words!

saxifraga said...

congratulations and good job. I wish it was me, but I have been working on articles for exactly one morning the entire semester. This has got to change. thanks for the inspiration.

DrOtter said...

Congratulations on getting all the words! I sort of managed it - my paper got sent to the academic who will be the corresponding author about 2 weeks ago. He has promised to polish and submit (hopefully) by Christmas. He's a bit slow so I'll believe it when I see it. The word count was around 7,500 depending on whether abbreviations and references count or not.

StyleyGeek said...

Awesome! Well done, propter doc! Abbreviations and references totally count.

Hey, the only reason I got such a big word count was that I kept restructuring my chapter and recounted each word in a paragraph every time I moved it :) (Well, okay, only on the slow days, and only if I changed the linking bits to the paragraph too).

Dr. Brazen Hussy said...

18 word reviews WOULD be awesome! No, those were document counts; didn't seem worth it to assign a word count to them. I kind of dropped off at the end of the month which really sucked, but it wasn't due to slacking, it was stupid work. But that is why I am going into Month Two!

Dr. Brazen Hussy said...

Oh, and congrats for winning!

Queen of West Procrastination said...

Yeah, I hugely fell off the wagon this month. Academically speaking.

On the other hand, I was an over-achieving TA, and if I tabulated how much I wrote this month, I probably achieved my goal, just in essay feedback.