So, 100 000 words to go – approximately. That doesn’t include all the hideous editing that I wil lface, plus the hundred small annoyances that go along with footnoting and revising and layout and presentation. I’m a little bit staggered at what I appear to have taken on, here. At least, I was, until I actually sat down and started planning it. Once you stop thinking about 100 000 words and start thinking about 5 000 words in the introduction, and 10 000 on this topic, and another 10 000 words on that topic, it suddenly seems more reasonable – possible, even. I know that’s a bit of a truism, but there you go.
I then started hammering away at my keyboard, locking myself away for a couple of hours and trying to really lay down what I wanted to talk about. Seemed pretty straightforward, right? After all, I’ve immersed myself in civics and citizenship education for the last three years, so I was expecting that I would know a lot about it. That seemed pretty easy – until I had to go back to my notes to check something.
Now I’ve got a pretty straightforward system. I’ve got broad categories of notes – like Popular Education, Civics and Citizenship Education, Critical Pedagogy and so on – and then everytime I read an article or a book, I write up my notes. Notes from the article go in one colour, quotes go in another (so they stand out) and my comments go in a third colour. Makes it pretty simple to follow.
One small problem, though…When I looked at what I’d already typed up, as opposed to what I’d written in my notes, there were significant departures – especially on examples of chronology and time. Clearly, I had already started to formulate my own explanation of what had happened – I’d over simplified, rather than sticking to the facts.
Back to the drawing board, then..