Research update #45: Proposal writing day 10 – that’s a good sentence

It’s true. I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve written today. After spending a lot of time digging around in the literature and then discussing my theoretical frameworks, today was about aims and research questions and then the intro and background. It’s kind of refreshing just being able to talk about why I’m doing this and what I’m hoping to achieve.

I’m still conscious of the fact that the proposal now has to go through Turnitin as part of the submission process but I’m going to share my sentence anyway because I think I’ve summed up the guts of what the research methodology will actually look like.

The research itself will involve triangulating data collected in surveys and interviews relating to the perceptions held of edvisors by edvisors, academics and institutional managers with other primary sources including job advertisements, position descriptions, academic literature, and organisational structures and strategies that reflect the reality of these relationships and understandings in practice. (me, today)

I’m not saying that I think this is the only good sentence that I’ve written but my methodology is something that I’ve struggled with and it’s nice to have a reasonably clear view on it. (I know that even this sentence is pretty light on for detail, there’s nothing about how I plan to code or analyse the data, but this is just for the introduction so that’s ok.

Now that I’ve been writing every day (more or less) for the last two weeks, I’m feeling like I’ve got some flow going on. I’m very conscious that this is only a first draft and there is a lot of room for improvements and make it sound more ‘proper’ in academic terms – though I’ve managed so far not to use any personal pronouns, which is apparently a thing – but the ideas are there and everything seems to be connecting kind of nicely.

Peter, my supervisor, expressed some fair concern that using a neologism like edvisor may not be everyone’s cup of tea and I can appreciate that. Even this though, I’m feeling like I’ve handled relatively well with an explanation in the opening pars of the introduction. (I could have just said newly coined word instead of neologism but the latter is a cool word in itself)