#thesising

[thewaywethinkiscool]

Tip: to keep track of sources, make a document of citations for EVERY SOURCE you come across that could be relevant and where to find it as you find them

Ex.

It's okay to here use a citation generator if you think you'll remember to double check them. And see how there's a ILL Requested thing? (Interlibrary loan) as soon as I get it and download it I instead wrote "downloaded" or "printed." Keeping it as linked until you think you can use it works too, and you can always change it.

Then, I note this on the pages themselves but it may even be better to do it right in the document-- always include in text citations as you write, and then when you do, note the first time youve used that source. Like I said, I did it on the source itself, but to do it here I'd just use an asterisk at the beginning

Like that.

Then to make your work cited page, just copy and paste the citations you actually used, double check that you have everything, and you've got your sources.

Doing this along the way can definitely help to keep track of where your sources are and if you've used them in the paper (you can also check to see if you've used it yet so you know if you've listed all the names and can now et-al them)

(Ps. If you don't know how to hyperlink in Google docs:)

Hyperlinking:

Highlight word

Right/double click, go to the link option

Paste your link & hit apply!

[philosophyblr]

ur gal just finished another chapter of her thesis!

[freezingfast]

I DEFEND MY MASTER’S THESIS TODAY AND I’M SO SCARED. WISH ME LUCK. I MIGHT HAVE MY SECOND DEGREE BY THE END OF TODAY

[potatosandpoetics]

— samuel delany, “science fiction and ‘literature,” or, the conscience of the king,” starboard wine

[sofonisbaanguissola]

The Girl I Went On A Date With And Kissed In The Gently Falling Snow wanted to read my thesis on her flight home for the holidays so i sent her a pdf and am kind of panicking now because my thesis is so important to me (and also gets SUPER personal at times) that letting someone read it is like……. five hundredth base.

[katiegrrl1016]

The culmination of my fangirl life is complete

Soooooooo... I turned in my MA Literature thesis today.

My 108-page thesis about Spuffy shipper fic as Literature. Using queer theory. And deconstruction. And Bakhtin. And close reading of my favorite piece of fanfiction of all time, “West of the Moon, East of the Sun” by @madlymel​ (she’s reposting an edited version of it on AO3, but if you want to read the version of it I used, you can here: http://www.bloodshedverse.com/stories.php?go=chapters&no=12116)

Something 11 year old budding fangirl me could not possibly imagine.

As one of my cohort said when she read a chapter: “You got to write about Spuffy penguin sex in your Master’s thesis. You’re basically winning at grad school.” (No seriously, I wrote about the subgenre of Penguin!Spuffy in the coda of my thesis. You can read the fanfic that started it all here: http://quinara.livejournal.com/125878.html)

I just want to take a moment to reflect on how important fandom has been to my life, and how much I appreciate the Spuffy shipper community. I basically grew up and developed as a person through reading fic (including fic that was wildly inappropriate given my age), commenting on stories, reading meta on LiveJournal, and even trying to write fic of my own (though I never finished a single story). I was a pretty lonely kid stuck in Catholic school, so some of my first friends with similar interests to me were made online in fandom. And some of my current friends IRL were made through fandom and Spuffy shipping. Grad school may have kept me off tumblr, but I’m definitely still a #fangirl4lyfe. 

Even though I never finished writing a piece of fanfiction, I actually managed to finish over a hundred pages of critical work legitimizing one of my favorite things on earth. And I got to affirm my fangirl, Spuffy shipper realness. Some people feel squicky about writing about fandom in academia, and I can see their concerns about exploitation or overgeneralization of fandom or violation of authorial permissions. But I think it’s really important work to push against the notion that shipper fic is just hysterical fangirl drivel. Academia is just the platform I ended up having the opportunity to do so, and I tried to avoid problems as best I could. 

So anyways, this is my thank you to the Buffy fandom and to Spuffy shippers everywhere. I love you, you’ve carried me through good and bad times, and you guys are amazing! When I posted looking for AU/AH fic converted into gen fic (which I didn’t even end up using for my thesis, sadly) y’all came through, and it reminded me what a wonderful community fandom can be sometimes...

[thewaywethinkiscool]

Found, cited, and printed 15/10 sources that're due tomorrow for thesising, have a better idea of my topic & am thanking god for Corey Keyes.

[sofonisbaanguissola]

The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes     brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge     lay my head in the space     between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done      or hiding from power in her love     like a man I refuse these givens      the splitting between love and action      I am choosing not to suffer uselessly      and not to use her I choose to love      this time      for once with all my intelligence.

from “splittings” by adrienne rich