My writing process is a fundamentally fragmented one. After outlining a rough structure of my arguments, I will type the beginning of sentences, or clauses that I know will follow a semicolon or dash, or sometimes simply part of a word, in and around the entire space where I am working. I’ll bounce around from section to section, tacking on ideas when they come to me. I’ll set up ironies or contradictions before dealing with the need to connect them and leave short phrases dangling because I know roughly what I meant to discuss. The paper finally comes into being as I slowly connect fragments, find the wherewithal to finish sentences, move ideas into the most seamless progression, revise word usage, eliminate unnecessary words, align verb tenses, and adjust clauses to ensure a pleasing cadence. Ordinarily, that stage of the paper will only last for a span of hours, as I eventually run up against the page limit and/or the time limit.
Thesis has taken this process to a whole new level, stretching it out into weeks and bringing whole new levels of recursive fragments. After my first-stage build-out, I decided I needed to dramatically extend the structure of the paper and proceeded to re-fragment and re-outline the top of the hourglass. I had been operating under the assumption that I needed to get to the thesis statement within three paragraphs and that these three paragraphs would be the entire background of my thesis. Thus, I was attempting to jam in a discussion of the nature and history of urban planning, neoliberalism as it relates to cities, gentrification theories, and the relation of transit to neoliberalism and gentrification via the concept of transit-oriented development. It was excessively dense and also did a poor job of laying the theoretical groundwork for my analysis. After re-examining previous theses (I referenced Gabby Henrie’s thesis on utopian eco-cities frequently, given its quality and overlapping topic of sustainable urban development), I realized that it was, in fact, expected to have an introduction before the main background section, with the thesis statement following the intro. Given that realization, I created multiple detailed outlines of the background. I tackled how to best entwine the disparate topics of my background, in order to minimize the amount of heavy-handed repetition required to emphasize the connections between them.
After much deliberation, I decided to use urban planning to introduce the paper as a whole, with an accelerated timeline situating the major elements of the paper in the broader history of urban planning, moving into a discussion of transportation investment that would introduce my thesis statement. I intend this history to introduce and support “my” theory about urban planning being a dialectic between social reform and facilitation of growth, with new ways of unifying these two threads emerging from the crises wrought by the unforeseen consequences of older orders of planning, shaped in reaction to the failures and contradictions of the previous institution. (It’s not exactly my theory, as I’ve since read a couple books espousing a similar analysis of urban planning, like Klemek’s Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal; I came up with the idea independently, though, which has to count for something.) Following that, I decided to sequence the major background as neoliberalism, gentrification, and finally smart growth/transit-oriented development, seeing this progression as best fitting the hourglass model—each proceeding topic can be nested within the prior. I then aligned my material with this outline, ruthlessly butchering sentence constructions and leaving my thesis a barren, fragmented mess. Then came the steady expansion, from 4,000 words to 11,000, as I reviewed, explained, and rehashed the theoretical frameworks I’ve explored over the last year. My work on the middle and bottom of the hourglass has been far steadier, consisting of much more modest additions and edits.
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