I had my meeting with Jocelyn today to discuss my thesis, and by and large I'm feeling pretty positive. She complimented my writing and the 'flow' of the work, and criticized mostly small things like sources, needing page numbers, and changing the format of my examples, as well as recognizing that while she and I both know what my use of terms like 'Dutchlike' refer to, I have to assume that the reader doesn't know anything about Dutch - thus, I have to explain everything, including the usage of such words. On a related note, she also advised me to delete words such as 'staggering', 'rampant', and 'very interesting' and instead go for a more 'scholarly' style. (Which made me laugh, since teachers have been trying to break me of my informality ever since Mrs. Hauenstein in sixth grade, who once wrote, "This conversational style is nice, and it's you, but stretch on the next assignment," on an essay.) However, she said I had organized the paper well and that I had plenty of data and didn't need any more sources, so all these issues should be fairly simple to fix.

We also decided to cut out Afrikaans, since it doesn't really contribute anything to the word-order theme (we had hoped it might, but it really didn't), and tighten up on the relevancy issue, since the paper's getting too long and too hard to follow. ("You need to be just ruthless, and slash through these bits, like, 'No! Not relevant!'") She admitted that everything I'd found was truly very interesting, but that it didn't all fit in the framework of the paper and so some of the issues like vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling needed to be summarized or even dismissed altogether, since they don't really relate to the central theme of word order. ("Don't throw them out, save them someplace, because they're great observations, but - that's not this paper.")

Truthfully, I'd realized how stream-of-consciousness I was being even at the time of the writing, but since so much of this is brand new to me, I was fascinated by (and thus wrote down) almost every single thing I found, no matter what genre of linguistics it was related to. And the current paper was never intended to be a final draft, so I was curious what Jocelyn might find relevant or a potential lead on something relevant. But after having taken a week's break from the thesis altogether - not to mention having gotten an outsider's perspective - I have a much clearer view of what's wrong with the paper and what I need to do to fix it - which is the whole point of having an advisor. So, yay for Jocelyn!

I also just got accepted into a GRE field test study, meaning I take the GRE again (for free) and get a check for $115, plus a chance at an extra $250 depending on my scores. That was exciting for about thirty seconds, but then I realized that the three participating testing centers in Florida are in Tampa, Miami, and Boca Raton, so they're too far from me to make it feasible. Darn. I could have used that money.

Anyway, Dia and I are finally going to watch Bridget Jones' Diary now - yippee!