hey everyone,

i have two chapters to go, of approximately 15,000 words in total, and i've reached the 80000 words limit. how do you cut down? did you read the whole thesis checking for repitition? did you get someone else to do this for you? did you ask your supervisor to cancel sections that weren't useful and to point out repititions? am considering asking my supervisor to do this. after all what is a supervisor there for? the problem with him is that he scheme reads the work instead of reading it word for word.


has anyone else struggled with this?

one of important parts of writing is to cut repetition and be able to decide what to include or not, so I think you have to do it again yourself, and after that you can hand it to your supervisor, and tell him/her that there might be repetition.

read what you wrote, and ask the question is this paragraph really necessary to include? or have I included it somewhere else?

Hope this help.

i think i have come to a point of saturation where i can't notice if am repeating. :-( i think i'll take a few days break and come back to it when am done. for now i will just write as is.

My supervisors read through my chapters and were very willing to point out repetition and also point out unnecessary words that could and should be trimmed.

Wish I was struggling with too many words - mine is the opposite problem! But apparently mine will be enough.

I had to cut about 30,000 words from my thesis. I just wrote the entire thing, knowing I was going over the limit. I planned to cut down at the very end, and so wasn't bothered a whole lot about the overall word count as I went--trying to stick close to what I was supposed to do, but not stressing when it started to go over. Its easier to cut than to write, I think. Well at least for me. I binned some of my favourite arguments, but they had to go, as they were not adding to the main line of thinking. I ended up with a much more streamlined argument and clear focus. So if you write another 30,000 words ( 15k per chapter) you will be just exactly where I was. A day at the keyboard with the delete key whacked it all down, no problems. Just write. Worry about cutting once its all written, then its more obvious what needs to go. At least that was my experience. Good luck!

Have you made use of endnotes/footnotes and put things in an appendix or two? I'm trying to keep each chapter close to the number of words I've allocated, they are still a bit over, but not too much and I'm hoping that once its more complete I will be able to see what can be removed. Incidentally here they have said there is a word limit...but they don't count the words.

Where I am endnotes and footnotes count towards the total word count. Which is helping me no end! I will be having a couple of appendices too, including 1 in electronic/CD form, but they don't count towards the word limit.

I suggest you to ask somebody else to read and review the chapters as a reader, 2-3 readers would be enough for such a problem. Good luck