It’s crunch time people. Three weeks remaining to write the personal research document. I’m at the point now where I have a mountain of information, which seems to get bigger every time I go anywhere near the internet. It’s a good thing, but at the same time it’s making constructing an argument very difficult. I’ve had to come up with a way of organising all this information in a way which makes sense. I think what I’ve done is actually going to prove very useful for the writing process. I can simply consult my masterplan…

This A2 sized beast of genius is just a mind map basically. What I’ve done is pinpoint common threads through out my research, and created the 8 categories seen in the photo. Some of these will no doubt blend in to one another when it comes to writing. Off of each of these categories is a list of resources, common ideas, and more importantly quotes and citations. I can start writing this by simply constructing these areas. I have numbered the categories in to a logical order for the argument, and then linked one to another so the writing has a flow which makes sense. The highlighted areas are articles/journals/resources I still need to read, but the fact I know what these are means everything is a quick google search away. As you can see some of these have been ticked off, or dismissed. It’s strange where these research documents take you. You find yourself meandering off point, and it takes something like this to pull your ideas back.

If anyone’s struggling with this project maybe you could try doing something similar. I know it certainly helped me collect my thoughts and visualise how this project will be constructed. Nerves are somewhat settled, but I’m still writing this to avoid writing the document…