Wednesday: 1st table tennis win!

21-15

Boom. My returns got better, I was more relaxed, and I was away. Also did a lot more controlling of the play - getting the ball off to one side or another to get the opponent running around a bit. Next things to work on: spinning and distance control. Would love to drop a nasty short backspin *just* into the opponent's half.

Research continues as normal. Waiting for them to approve giving me microsoft office so I can sort out references with endnote web that much easier, so just focusing on writing the main text at the mo, and putting in references manually with a view to updating them once this is sorted.

It does start to drag a bit, which is why the clinical days are nice. Reading, re-reading and slightly tweaking the same page over and over before the 1st draft is done is frustrating, but that's how I do it. That's how bad it gets - I frustrate myself that I'm such a perfectionist about these things. The problem is partly in the name. 1st draft implies a rough selection of ideas splurged onto paper. Researchers don't see it that way though - a 1st draft to them is a fully completed and written paper that just hasn't been submitted to a supervisor for 'professional' reading and input yet. To me, this is currently more like a third draft, as I've shaped it from being a selection of titles across several pages into a justified aligned introduction and methods with yellow highlighted sentences that may belong elsewhere in the document or may need re-wording. But the fact that I'm still working on the 1st draft sounds like a lot less of an accomplishment than what I've actually done. The results are essentially just a table, which is easy enough, and the analysis points are fairly self-explanatory/obvious. As usual, it's the introduction and discussion that take most of the work, as they're the bits that need thinking about, careful wording, and lots of references.

Oh, and there's a 2000 word limit. Great.

At some point, probably this weekend, I'm hoping to be able to say "1st draft done". That gives me 2 weeks to edit it. Do-able.