writing a thesis is a painful process

Writing a thesis, I have discovered, is a painful process, so to inspire me in my writing and to let me see an overview of my research topics, thought I'd make use of Wordle and create image clouds of each chapter as it progresses.
Here's chapter 1:

Finally, although it's not writing a novel, I can take some comfort from the words of one of my favourite authors, George Orwell, who said that;

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.- Why I Write

May the illness end soon.

Writing update

Well, I've been using Buzzword on and off for the past few weeks. I've been switching between Word and Buzzword (and the archaic use of pencil and paper too) in a random and sporadic manner. In actual fact I've been tending to use Word to draft some rough paragraphs and then copy them into Buzzword to compile it.

Still very happy with Buzzword, although there was one rather frustrating day when it was being upgraded or offline for some reason. So, I reverted to my mac's trusty TextEdit for the day instead!

I've just shared two files with my supervisors for comments, so we'll see what happens and how Buzzword, and my supervisors, cope with that.

As an aside, I'm currently half considering the use of InDesign at the end to format all the copy and convert to pdf (I hope to turn my thesis into a set of Lulu books). Only trouble is I don't know how to use InDesign yet, but that seems like a minor point!

Buzzword - Am I being as stupid as I think I may be?

So the title says it all really. I've decided to take what I think may be a somewhat unusual step on my road to PhD thesis writing. I'm using Adobe's Buzzword.

Yes, I know it's pretty simplistic, but if I'm honest that what appeals. An online, accessible-from-anywhere, intuitive, and, frankly, elegant design for creating documents just screams 'use me'.

It could be dangerous (it's still in Beta afterall). What if I lose files, want to add TOC (table of contents), and other exciting MS Word features? Hmmm, well I've thought about it and my concession is this - I don't think it's going to be completely realistic for me to use Buzzword as my one and only word processor and I'm going to be printing off lots of draft versions as back up (which I do when using Word anyway). So I'll be switching between Buzzword for creating drafts and Word for 'fine-tuning' the drafts.

I feel like I can write quicker and create smaller (read as 'concise'!), more modular documents in Buzzword's simple, uncluttered interface (with half a mind somehow aware of the hellish task awaiting me in collating these multitude of docs with only Word).

Yet it seems appropriate to use an online tool to tell my thesis story - after all my research is all about how technology is changing the way we communicate. Why not extend that to the way we create and distribute?

Any comments from anyone who has used Buzzword would be welcome...