Over this past week, I’ve received extended feedback on the comparatively finished draft I had last week from Liz. She said it was a broadly good draft, though the opening section needed work. Liz gave me the valuable advice that the urban planning section needed to be more developed, with more definition of the terms used, more scholarly citations, and more contextualizing historic information. Overall, it was poorly suited to acting as the introduction to the whole paper. I saw her point completely, and made substantial changes to reflect this problem. I moved the bulk of the planning discussion into the main section of the background, leaving only a very theoretical introduction to planning at the beginning of the paper. I then bulked up the discussion of planning in general, especially of the modernist planning era, which I had treated in a rather abrupt and generalized way.
The other major piece of advice Liz gave me was to include a roadmap for the paper, discussing the outline of the paper in the introduction so as to give the reader an idea where the argument is going. I acceeded to this formatting requirement and, though roadmaps are probably my least favorite section of academic works, I can see the value in having one for a work that is now, with the figures and bibliography included, fifty pages. I then added an abstract, which was a surprisingly difficult and clarifying thing to do—to boil down the argument into one key paragraph. With an abstract, roadmap, and finally discrete sections according to a table of contents, this thesis is starting to really look like a thesis.
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