Friday 19 June 2015

Message: Three Months Before PhD Confirmation & My CAES Talk




First page of my presentation slide
Image from Locky's English Playground

In less than three months time, I will be submitting a PhD confirmation report as well as presenting my initial findings to the board. This is something all PhD candidates must overcome in order to proceed with the research project. It is an important stage and I would like to do it well, and so last week, I picked up my 19,000-word thesis draft again having left it untouched for months.

Looking back at the previous stuff I wrote, I was largely unorganised and incoherent. It seems to me that I will have to speed up with the writing process or I will risk having a paper full of potential for landfill. What saddens me is that, I haven't even spent much time on writing my blog half as much but I am already feeling a lack of time.

Researching in creative language use in English seems far more interesting than most of the things I encounter these days, but none of that can be published here before I get them published in journals, if I ever manage to get them to.

No one was presenting before me, so I took a selfie! Overly-smudged face by Samsung's default camera mode
Image from Locky's English Playground

My talk at the CAES conference at HKU last week wasn't as good as I have expected. I actually could have answered my questions better that day during the Q & A session, and the fact that I forgot to play a short video clip of the TV drama eventually led to some wrongly asked questions from the audience, as they thought House M.D. uses specialised discourse and therefore a specialised corpus should be used instead of COCA. These are questions I should have expected for audience who knows little about the TV drama. That night, I immediately made changes to my slides when I got home. It is hopeful that when I present this study again next week at the Asialex 2015 at PolyU I can make a better impression on the audience.




Resources:
Message: My First 7000-Word Paper & Upcoming Talks @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.hk/2015/05/message-my-first-7000-word-paper.html