Following on from the Simpsons and Family Guy it appears that PhD Comics are planning a film… This may be just a gag but hey – if it is, I am not going to complain because the trailer is good enough as it is :)
PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
That might also explain their absence of comics recently…
I’ve written quite a few abstracts by now, but after punching out two pages for my PhD, and having a relatively ok response to it, I read the university regulations: The word-limit is 300 words. THREE HUNDRED?? Are they mad, that’s not even a hundred pages per year at this stage – how the &%!£ is that supposed to be… Come on, conference papers usually get 250 words, so an extra 50 because its a Ph.D. Thanks.
So that was my initial panic. Now I remember working on a film-script which took 4 months some years ago, and we got how long to pitch it? 5 minutes. And of those, we only got to talk for 50 odd seconds. But we’d practiced for that – so how to practice this? I guess the story is similar for a book pitch. You want to write 80,000 words, good, but the editors wants to see 300 words that will make them read the whole abstract, excite them and then give you money to do the work. But I’ve never written a book before. With that mind-set I figured there had had to be lots of ‘how to write a great abstract’ papers out there. How wrong I was.
Thus far I have found two pieces of solid advice. The first is now written in big bold red across the header of my abstract, and the second is just below in black italics:
An abstract is not an introduction. It is a résumé of your thesis
………………………………………-Joe Wolfe, U. of New South WalesMore is in vain, when less will serve
………………………………………-René Descartes, 1638
Right. All I have to do is: Explain what I’ve done, how I did it, and the exciting results. Bad news: This blog post is 300 words long. Shit.
This is hilarious.
Publish Now !
Courtesy of The Metrics Gang or our fellow Economics Ph.D. grunts at Berkeley this one from Vimeo - it’s great !
