WonL
The random thoughts of an architect-turned- lawyer from the deep south living in Washington, DC...
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Paper writing woes
Dearest loyal (and bored) readers,I realize I am slacking here. While some of my favorite bloggers are doing a post a day, I am gearing towards, um, one a week. For this, I am sorry. However, I cannot promise this will change anytime soon. Things are about to get downright crazy. In my quest to fulfill my writing requirement (so I can actually graduate from law school) I am writing a thirty-page legal analysis of women under Islamic Law. Well, that is quite a bit of information to gather, read, comprehend, sort through, narrow, organize and analyze in just a wee bit of time. And as if that stress (in addition to normal law school) was not enough, I felt the need to add some more to my life. After reading a great article on point in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, I decided to email the author and let her know how great I thought she and her article were...and also to thank her for some great material for my paper. She emailed me back thanking me for the kind words and asking to read my "dissertation" when I am done. Um, crap. This lady is pretty well-known considering she was captured by the Taliban and all. I didn't really expect to hear back, much less for her to have any interest in little ole me. Sonofa...now this paper has to actually be good. Ben's reaction: "I know this lady, she is on channel 299. I will watch her and proudly think that she will read my lady's paper." Seriously, he is just too cute. Sigh. Where was I? Oh yeah, I just re-read that paragraph and realized this might be the suckiest post ever. So, to end on an even lower note, I shall list for you some things I learned while writing my paper this weekend:
I have been spelling (and pronouncing) menstruate wrong all these years. I never knew about the "u". It's men-stroo-eyt. There is a "stroo" in there. WOW.
Ctrl + Alt + F saves tons of time and eliminates the "Insert, References, Footnote" process.
The default for word counting does not include footnotes. You must check a box. Then, you get lots more words.
My fingers are getting into the habit of typing so quickly, I am competley missng leters. (Okay, I sorta did that one on purpose.)
Islam is a very difficult religious/legal system to learn in a month.
I must be drawn to a certain writing style, as I looked down at one point this weekend and realized I had three books by John L. Esposito.
I am pretty sure I am mispronouncing half the words in my paper. Except "ijtihad". I found a pronunciation of ij-tee-hod somewhere on the internet.
I will close out my weekend with 10 pages down and 20 to go.
Since I don't actually use blogger to type and publish any of my posts, I just go irate at my stupid program because it wouldn't freaking publish. After well over 15 tries, I decided to go to blogger.com to see that it was down for maintenance. Ugh.