Jean gave me her comments on my first draft today. There are more specific comments in the word doc, but here are her overall comments:
Hi Caitlin – Great work on this draft! Of course I have comments, but you should feel good about what you’ve accomplished so far. You’re well on your way to completion.
At this point in time you should be doing the following:
- make sure you’ve applied for graduation and to participate in Commencement. I’m not sure ifyou can order your robes yet, but do that as soon as Drexel makes it available. You’re going to finish!
- start working on filling the various holes you’ve left in the thesis document – I think you have most of them marked for yourself but check against the thesis manual to make sure nothing is left out and that you’ve used the correct format where indicated
- read these comments and the comments on the paper and start working on your revision. If you can get your next draft back to me in 10 days to 2 weeks, that would be perfect.
Here are my general thoughts on what you have so far:
As I read your thesis, I didn’t realize how much you had actually compiled already, and that the resource you suggest in your paper ought to be created has in fact been started by you as part of your research for this paper.
So early in your paper, you need to state that in fact one of your results is the beginnings of creating a database (if that’s the right word for what you have) that you believe would be a benefit to the field and help to improve practices as you suggest at the end. As I read the paper, I found I wasn’t expecting to find this huge resource at the end – it came as a surprise!
Likewise, when you first describe your surveys, you should indicate that your survey questions are available in Appendix A (or whatever is the right label), and summarize what you asked about for each survey. What you asked is really important because it helps your reader to know what you were trying to find out, and what you would not have been able to find out. If there are types of issues or questions that you thought about but deliberately left out, that you think a lot of readers might have questions about, you should mention them in the section where you explain the limitations of the study.
As I read through your lit review and your paper, it looks as if there is almost nothing written at all about museum memberships – you could certainly cite recent books and articles about changes in museum practice and explain that while many of them discuss membership, none focus on the particular issues you want to explore regarding RMPs. Right now you have so little it doesn’t look as if you’ve actually done a search. I’m sure you looked at a variety of sources in your search. Summarize what areas of museum management they DO cover so it will be clear you’ve covered your bases. The summary can be very brief, lumping a group of texts together under a general description of the kinds of things they do cover.
Next – how to close out each section. I know the thesis manual suggests you should write a concluding paragraph, but yours appear to move up to such a high level of generality as to not be useful. Your concluding paragraph should summarize the preceding discussion and highlight what you think are the key points from that section or chapter.
Chapter Two – I have lots of detailed notes on this section on the draft – see notes. ? I think the most important thing you have to say is to set up the central information resource, but I wonder where you think it belongs – AAM? On their website? Should this be something that’s interactive, that each RMP manager would edit/update him or herself? You can suggest one or more possible ways to set this up. Your recommendation about an RMP awareness day sounds less convicning – see my notes on this section as well.
Conclusion – Your conclusion should clarify what you found out, what your key recommendations are, and should make it clear that you’ve already started on establishing the central resource you propose – you just need a place for it to go and a method for gathering/updating the info. You need a host!
OK, I think this gives you plenty to do. I have very very little to say about editing/proofreading. There are a few spots highlighted in yellow that need some proofreading, but really your writing is very polished. The work you have left to do is mostly about making sure that your reader can tell what you’ve learned and is convinced about the need for the changes you recommend (and also can see that there’s a realistic way to accomplish what you suggest).
I look forward to your next draft!
- Jean
No comments:
Post a Comment