Dissertating!

I still intend to blog about the end of Deep Space Nine, and now I have intentions of blogging about The Expanse, which you and everyone else who watches space opera should watch, but I'm spent. A complete draft of my dissertation is due in five days (four, once you read this), and I haven't got the wherewithal to write anything else tonight.

The obligatory PhD Comic.

So, based on something I wrote on facebook, here is a list of things I wish my dissertation committee would stop pointing out:

1. Sentences that are really three or four sentences held together by overly generous use of em-dashes, colons, and semicolons.
2. Words I just completely made up because I don't know what the right word is.
3. Pronouns that don't have referents.
4. Places where I assume the reader knows as much about Victorian philosophy of science as I do.
5. That halfway through a chapter I forgot a key term and substituted a different, less precise word.
6. The fact that my explanation of the fact that the gardening guidebook Dorothea Brooke reads in Middlemarch was written by James Loudon, husband to Jane Webb Loudon, author of the early science fiction novel The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century probably belongs in a end note because it had literally nothing to do with my argument.
7. Places where my meaning is completely unclear if you can't read my mind. Like, why don't you just know what I mean!? You're smart people, work it out for yourselves!

Things would just go a lot quicker if people would stop pointing out when I do a bad job!