It's been an almighty struggle, what with the frantic 'holiday' i've had as well. But i'm pleased to say i'm basically done. I may have gone a little overboard, but i always do. Better overboard than underboard.
Of course it's over the word limit, and i'll ahve to spend the rest of today killing it and taking away all the eloquent parts of my writing to make it fit into a stupid and absurdly small word limit. How can one write about the main principles of modernism in 1500 words? I can write more than that in half an hour of my free time! Of course, I've only focused on one aspect, but even that aspect is so big and so vastly intersting that i could go on forever. I've selected the bare essentials, and evne those i've had to scale down. I just hope the whole thing make sense. I can't cut any more from the first three sections. Section four is still 120 words over despite my brutally murdering all the good bits.
The main problem if you ask me is the citations issue. It is wholely unfair that all the useless and irrelevant bits in brackets be counted in my word limit. They're not my words! I expect the actual quotes to be included, although that's not exactly fair either, but why the bracketed bits? It's not my fault if a publisher had about 5000 words in their title, or if there are two authors and an editor! In any other essay or referencing system, these little bits of who-knows-what could just go in a footnote and not be counted, or, better still, in endnotes or just the bibliography. The thing that swallowed up my word limit on section three was purely the brackets.
I've just gotten back from Italy, where I salivated over the thesis of the friend I was staying with. It was 474 PAGES long! I asked her about the word limit and she looked confused, befroe explaining there was no such concept over there. What is wrong with this country? I always looked forward to my third year dissertation, thinking it was going to be a limit of about 50,000 words, which i thought was enough to play with, elaborate, research properly and critically explain, and remain in the limit. Last term I dismally found out the third year dissertation word limit is 6000. Sob.
Makes me wish I'd done history, as I had at one time planned to. I think they get a much better word limit.
But anyway, cruel, laughing deans, I'm posting bits of my essay now, so at least I can show 'progress'. The following are all after one or two edits.
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