Managing a mental block about feedback

March 7, 2023March 7, 20234 Comments

Hello, my name is Sherran, and I am afraid of feedback on my writing.

There, I said it. I have a mental block, or maybe it’s an emotional sort of block, about feedback. I find it really hard to open feedback and face it, in whatever form it comes. I fear it – it raises my anxiety levels, it makes me feel unsettled and a bit ill sometimes. I always, always *know* it will be bad (read: negative, will make me feel horrible, will tell me I’m actually not a good writer/teacher/assessor/supervisor). So convinced am I of this *fact* that I avoid feedback as long as I possibly can. This is perhaps not the healthiest of attitudes.

During my PhD, even though after getting to know my supervisor, I knew – actually knew, not just believed – that her feedback was never mean, always constructive, incisive, and would make my writing and thinking sharper, it took me on average three days to open a feedback email, and a further day or two to open the file and read all of the comments. This process was, of course, not about my supervisor at all, or even her feedback per se, and all about me – my insecurities, my sense of being some kind of fraud, my fears of not being good enough. I think it was also linked to my deep need for gold stars and top marks, and my knowing that this was unlikely to be coming from the feedback, because a PhD is a constant learning journey and you don’t actually get a mark or a gold star.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

Many of the students and academics I have met and worked with over the years have been high achievers. They have high standards for themselves and tend to be hard on themselves when they don’t meet those standards or produce the work they believe they should be able to produce. Many of the students and academics I work with also tend to do research on or about subjects they are really passionate about and believe in deeply. They cannot easily separate their writing from who they are in the world and what matters to them. This means, of course, that feedback becomes a fraught experience. Things supervisors/reviewers/examiners say to you about the writing, the argument, the tone, the depth of the thinking, become things they say about *you* – about how you are not (yet) good enough or clever enough or thoughtful enough. This makes working with feedback difficult.

Let’s take the first issue: high standards and a desire for gold stars, praise, and acknowledgment of your brilliant work. When I wrote my thesis, I secretly wanted to write the best thesis any examiner had ever read. I kept this a secret because I knew, of course, that this was a ludicrous goal. But I carry with me my younger self, who won writing prizes and academic awards, and she quite liked being the ‘clever one’. Current me understands that there are many ways to be ‘clever’ and that the best kind of writing is not actually ‘perfect’ and needs feedback, revisions, and reworking to be persuasive, clear, well-received by my peers, and, eventually, cited by other researchers. I did not, of course, write the best thesis ever. I have not written the best book ever, or the best paper ever. And no one ever will – objectively speaking. These things are ideals, not reals. Subjectively, I have written papers I am proud of and like re-reading, and that have been well cited. That is so much more than enough, and I need to remember that impressing reviewers enough to get their critique and feedback is a gold star. Being published and cited is acknowledgement of my work. But I can’t get there without facing and overcoming my fear of feedback.

Then the second issue: conflating what you write about with who you are in the world and then taking feedback way too personally. We all – or most of us – have some kind of passionate attachment to our research. We believe in it enough to spend years doing it, we know that other people need to know about it and read our writing, we feel that the words on the pages that take so long to write and edit and revise are part of us. So when a reviewer or examiner critiques the thinking behind an argument we’ve made, or the currency of the literature we have cited, or the depth of our analysis, it is really hard not to take it personally and see it as a statement about us as thinkers, readers, and writers. *You* are not a deep enough thinker; *you* are not a very good writer. That’s not what they are actually saying. What supervisors, examiners and reviewers are saying is ‘you are joining our field as a peer, and we want to help you make the strongest contribution possible, so here is some feedback so that you can use to help you sharpen your thinking, update your reading, deepen your analysis’. This process is not not about you, because you are the writer getting the feedback, but it is a not a personal attack (most of the time). So learning how to read feedback, feel your feelings, and then separate your self from the work the feedback is suggesting you do is a helpful way to overcome your fear.

I am not sure that my mental block about feedback will ever go away, because – as I started out saying – it is linked to my own insecurities and sense of being a fraud, and I don’t know that this will ever go away. But, the more I write and submit my work to reviewers and critical friends, the more feedback I get, and the more I realise that what I am being offered is actually there to help me feel less insecure, less like a fraud, more part of a rich, generative series of conversations in my field that I am interested in and that excite me as a researcher. I am being offered chances to learn about myself as a writer and my writing style and process, and chances to make my writing clearer, sharper, more creative, better. When I remember this I feel less afraid of feedback, or at least more able to make myself brave enough to open the email, read the comments, and work on my writing. I think perhaps all we can all do is work on being braver – about putting our writing down on paper, sending it out into the world, and taking feedback on board as part and parcel of this process.

Corrections and revisions: same thing or different?

October 26, 2021October 20, 20213 Comments

For any piece of writing, especially something substantial such as a report, a paper or a thesis chapter, there is going to be more than one draft. This means there will be feedback from others, reflection on your own about what works in the writing and what needs further work, and time spent reworking, revising, rewriting, editing and proofreading. Corrections and revisions. For more experienced writers, I think the difference between these two acts in writing are perhaps clearer than for less experienced writers, such as postgraduate students. Two separate conversations with two of my own students recently pointed me to this: both spoke of getting to the corrections and sending me fresh drafts, when I had not offered very much at all by way of corrections and was mostly looking for more significant revisions. I wondered, then, how academia in general uses these words: Are corrections seen to be the same thing as revisions? What do supervisors mean by these two words and why (and how) do we need to speak about this openly with our students?

Let’s start, perhaps, with the basic meanings of these terms and what they imply as work for writers. Revisions (see this very useful post by Pat Thomson on this) can imply minor to significant amounts of work for writers. Regardless of the amount of work, the point of revision is to re-think, re-read – perhaps read more than you already have – re-write and even re-organise your writing. It involves active engagement with your ideas, with feedback from critical friends/supervisors/reviewers; it involves both mental and emotional labour because it can be hard work to hear that your ideas or argument do not work, that your evidence and explanations are not persuasive enough, that your thinking is not as clear to your reader as it seemed to you. You need to motivate and cajole yourself into going back to a piece of writing you want to move on from to do this ‘more’ work that is asked of you. So revisions are hard, and many times, revisions suck.

Corrections, by contrast, imply less of this active thinking and engaged work. To correct something is to fix it, and usually in writing feedback this implies a global find and replace exercise to make, for example, your referencing format or use of quotation marks or spellings consistent and uniform across your text; it can imply correcting the usage of a technical term, editing your writing to correct typos and grammatical mistakes. Corrections can be done without much emotional investment or brain power, although seeing stupid mistakes you have made can be frustrating! Corrections, if I am doing my job well as a supervisor and critical friend, are not what I direct writers to first, unless it really is the only or main thing they need to focus on to improve their text. Corrections should not be focused on in feedback at the expense of guidance, questions and suggestions about the ideas, the structure, the argument, the theory or research methodology, the findings and assumptions, and so on. In writing development practice, revisions are called ‘higher order’ or primary concerns; corrections are usually ‘lower order’ or secondary and come after the more substantial revisions have been made, usually over a few drafts.

When I tell my students that I am sending them feedback, unless we are pretty close to the final draft I assume they understand that what I am asking them to engage in is a process of revisions. But I have come to realise recently that some of my students, particularly those new to postgraduate study and these long and involved writing and research processes, are not always clear on this. Often, when they say ‘I’ll do the corrections’, they do literally mean that they will try their best to ‘fix’ their writing and will look for the errors and fixes and do these first, with less time spent thinking about the deeper, and more necessary, revisions. If I get a draft back within a week on which my feedback focused on the need for new reading, thinking through the links between different concepts or ideas, adding significant explanations, elaborations or new reading/references, I am always worried that the text has been approached in correction mode, rather than revision mode. It’s not always the case: sometime a student or writer has time and can spend a few days solidly working on and thinking about the revisions. But usually, the text comes back with many of the original concerns still relevant; with the revisions still need to be properly thought about and effected.

This misunderstanding stems, in my experience, from a few concerns, two of which can be openly addressed in supervision, at the outset and on an ongoing basis as needed. The first is the transition from writing as an undergrad to writing as a postgrad. Writing as an undergrad seldom involves drafting. Typically, an assignment is written once, assessed, and you move on to the next one. At senior levels or in specific literacy development courses, you may write one draft, receive formative feedback and then write another ‘final’ draft, but multiple drafts of one piece of writing-thinking is not a typical feature of undergraduate study. Moving from seeing your writing as assignments-for-marks to developmental pieces of thinking is a huge shift, then. If you have be trained to get your writing ‘right’ in one or two goes, the idea of having to take more then two goes can seem really odd and unsettling: why can’t I just write it and have it be right? Why do I have to keep answering questions, reading, thinking, rewriting – what’s wrong with me? We need to talk to postgraduate students differently about writing, as fellow writers. Show them a folder for a paper you have written, or your own MA or PhD folder for chapters. Talk them through your own writing-feedback-redrafting-finalising process for papers or chapter you have written and are writing. Don’t assume they know what revisions are and what to do to move constructively from one draft to the next.

This links to a second concern that can and should be addressed in supervision: working with feedback is, in itself, a literacy practice that needs to be learned and can be taught. Do your students know what a question mark in the margin of their draft means when you put it there? Do they know what you are questioning, and why? Do they know what to do with questions you ask them in comment bubbles, or with a comment like: ‘This is unclear’, or ‘Irrelevant information’. Do they know what your feedback language means, how the words and phrases and form of feedback-giving you choose to use communicates your expectations of their writing, thinking and argumentation work? You can take a supervision session to actually open this out for discussion with students: This is how I give feedback, this is why I choose to give my feedback using this form or method, this is what I expect you to do with the revisions and redrafting. You can (and should) make it okay for students to ask questions, and especially at doctoral level, to disagree with you or speak back to the feedback, because they are expected to own their writing and the argument they are building. Making this a process of learning, a pedagogic or teaching moment (or series of moments as the case may be) enables you to have necessary conversations that can help your students get to know you as a supervisor and help them understand how to make the shift from their prior level of study to their new level. More than this, these conversations can enable your students to develop a meta-level understanding of the processes that go into building a sophisticated, layered argument that involves many steps, and often a mix of literature, theory, methodology, analysis and cohesive and coherent thinking and writing. For doctoral students who will go on to supervise and mentor other students in their career, this meta-learning is crucial.

Revisions and corrections, then, are not the same thing. Assuming your students know what each of these acts involves, what the difference is in terms of your meanings of each of these acts in your feedback, and how to respond in their ongoing reading, writing and thinking work can lead to confusion and frustration for both you and your students, and your students may struggle to make the progress everyone desires. Rather, make the time to open up a conversation about what writing a thesis is all about, and the thinking work that goes into it, and the time that thinking takes. Link this to drafting, and normalise the idea of writing and thinking as practices, not skills; they take work and time and effort, and need feedback and revisions to improve. Then talk about how and why you give feedback, and maybe use this an as opportunity to revisit the way you give feedback to your students – this is an area where I am always learning, and where small changes can make a big difference to how students feel about and approach their research. The point is to talk about it, invite students to ask questions and take ownership of their writing, make the work of writing and thinking more visible and shared. Writing is a social practice, not a solitary act of applying skills, and the more we show this to our students, the more able they are to embrace the process and the work that goes with it.

‘Put down the red pen’: Some thoughts-in-progress on feedback-giving

November 29, 2020November 29, 2020Leave a comment

I haven’t posted anything in ages, for a range of reasons, mostly to do with just having a super tired brain that can really only do what it has to do and nothing extra. I try to make writing blog posts part of my weekly work, but I do also need some creative oomph to find a hook and be myself and share some thoughts (hopefully wisdom) on subjects I am thinking about and think readers might be interested in. And that oomph has been in ever-shorter supply lately. Mainly, I have been spending a lot of my time giving writers feedback on their own writing, and have run out of steam for mine in the process. But, the upside of this is that I have been thinking a lot about feedback-giving and reflecting on doing this online (as opposed to pen-and-paper). Specifically, when do you jump in and track changes, and when do you back off and highlight errors for writers to fix themselves, and how much feedback is too much in the average 10-12 page paper or chapter draft?

There is a large amount of very good research out there on feedback: what and when and how and why and how much. There are many differing viewpoints, of course, but one thing much of the research in recent years can agree on is that feedback works best when it invites dialogue and conversation between the feedback-giver and the writer(s) receiving it. In essence, this means moving from telling writers what to do, to offering advice, prompts, suggestions and explanations that enable and encourage them to sit with their writing and work in revising and correcting it themselves. In this process, they hopefully gain greater insight into and understanding of themselves as writers and not only what they are writing about, but how they are writing about it too, and the effect of their writing on a reader. This is the “critical friend” position: as your feedback-giver, I am here as a friend, but not one who will tell you your writing is perfect (because we know there is no such thing, right?) I will point out errors, gaps and so on from the perspective of a reader, and advise you as best I can on how you could improve the next draft (at least).

But, the question then becomes: How? How do I offer advice, suggestions, explanations and so on? How much feedback is too much feedback for a writer to make sense of and work with? How many times might I get to read this piece? How do I hold myself back from just re-writing parts of this for them (especially if the writer is my student)?

These How? questions are the subject, again, of much research and fraught conversation in academia, especially as we have moved more and more online in the recent past, and more than perhaps ever before in 2020. We are not necessarily marking by hand, which limits the amount of correcting we can do and comments as can offer, because margin space is limited. I find that I tend to be more discerning when I mark by hand about what to focus on and what to leave, and then how to explain to students the feedback and ongoing revision work. Online, in Word or PDF, I can comment on every error, every line of text if I want to. I don’t have to discern in the same way because space is not as limited in an online text. I can cross out your writing and write my own version over it, potentially taking your ownership of your text away (you can reject my changes, but how many students do this?) I can delete parts of your text, even.

This is where the How? questions can become tricky, and require some introspection on what you are trying to do with your feedback to your students or peers, and what they need to get out of it. If you see feedback as mainly about producing a “perfect” text, then you may well track changes, type over the author’s words and, in the process, assert yourself as part-author of that text. If they don’t understand the thinking or grammatical rules and so on behind the changes you have made, and they see you as an authority, they may just “Accept All” and send it back. But, whose work are you then assessing: yours or theirs? Whose ‘voice’ comes through the text? I have given into the temptation to do too much of this, and have ended up reading revised writing that sounds way more like me that my student in places. It’s an uncomfortable feeling because I know they are not learning and growing as much as they could if I pulled back and tried something less directive (even if that would take more time all round).

Photo by Frans Van Heerden on Pexels.com

If I see feedback, then, as helping students and writers to become more authorial, more in control of their text, their meanings and the knowledge they are creating – and this is certainly the case when you are working with postgraduate and postdoctoral students and writers as I am – I have to work differently. First, I cannot jump on every error and correct it. I try to find two or three examples of the error, if it is repeated, and in the comment bubble, I try to explain as clearly as I can why this is an error and how they can fix it. Sometimes they copy and paste my words from the bubble into the text without thinking too hard, but often, what comes back is a step forward. I have to offer my advice as questions, prompts, suggestions rather than instructions, so that their input (even if this is not shared with me directly) is invited and prioritised in revisions.

Second, depending on how many times I am going to get to see this draft, or where this assignment is placed within a whole assignment plan, I have to be discerning about how many things I comment on and how I approach the feedback process. Do I highlight all of the confusions I see, every missing link between sections and paragraphs, every muddled/long/obtuse sentence, every claim that has no evidence or elaboration behind it? If I do, with that be 20 comments over a 10 page piece of writing, or 40? And, even if it is only 20, will that be too much for this writer or this student? How much time do they have to sit with the comments, make sense of them, ask for clarification, have a meeting with me on Zoom? If this is a doctoral or Masters student writing a thesis, that’s probably an okay amount, because we’ll chat about it in supervision and they’ll likely have a few weeks to work on the next draft. If this is a writer working on a paper for publication, they may, too, have time to rework the paper.

But time is not the only factor, right? We also have to think about the level of confidence of the student, and how much they can actually cope with, mentally and emotionally. Will this feedback really help this student/writer, or will it paralyse them? We all experience anxiety and a bit of paralysis when we get feedback and have to start revisions, no matter how confident we may be as writers. But, the more experienced writers who have gone through the process of getting things wrong, being guided to a more sound position and getting their writing there through revisions and redrafting, may be less overwhelmed by critical feedback given in larger amounts. They know it will probably be okay in the end, even if it hurts and is hard to work through now, and will take time and effort.

But the average student has not yet been through this process enough to know that the feedback doesn’t mean they are stupid, or should not be writing a thesis or paper, and that if they do the work it will probably be okay in the end. So, I try to be conscious of my tone, and also how much feedback I offer and what I offer it on, to try not to overwhelm and paralyse the writers and students I work with. This is the hardest part of online feedback for me – pulling back and leaving things I know I could comment on but that perhaps are not so important right now. I tend to over-comment, to be honest. What I have started doing is forcing myself to just read a few pages without making any comments and changes, and then think about what most needs to be done to improve the next draft. Then I write one or two longer comments on the pages, rather than 10 small comments. This is hard, but it feels better to me in terms of the presence I take up in the text. Of course, this always depends on what I reading, why I am offering feedback and where the writer/student is, but as a general practice, it prevents me from going overboard.

I have also started sending my students and writers small summary voice-notes. This is partly because I get lazy about typing long summary comments, and partly to moderate the tone of my feedback in this online life where I don’t always get to meet the writers and students on Zoom to explain the feedback to them. I have found a free audio recorder app that works on my laptop and creates small files (about 3mb for a 5 minute recording), and I talk my summary feedback. I say ‘hello’ and offer them an overview of my impression of the text as their reader, and then highlight 2 or 3 main things I think really need to be part of the next draft. I always sign off with an encouraging comment, so that when they then open the text file, that’s hopefully what they hear in their heads.

The feedback from my students so far has been that they like the voice notes, and that these do indeed take the sting and fear out of the feedback a bit and make it a bit easier to ‘hear’ my voice in the comments encouraging rather than scolding them. We never really know all of what writers and students have experienced around their earlier writing, reading and feedback outings before we work with them; even if you have encouraging intentions, your feedback can still be heard in a negative tone in their heads. The voice notes may help to mitigate this over time. Maybe, if they hear an encouraging voice enough in a voice note and in the written comments it may over-write any mean voices telling them they can’t do this. I hope it will.

Feedback-giving online is tough, certainly for me. I really battle to put down the metaphorical red pen in the form of tracked changes and multiple comment bubbles, and focus on ‘higher order’ concerns around argument, understanding, cohesion and sense-making. It’s much easier to over-write and fix small mistakes, especially when you are tired and longer explanatory comments are hard to express clearly. But, I try to stop myself when I feel I am heading in this direction, take a break from the feedback and come back to it with a clearer head. This doesn’t always work out, of course, with deadlines and many tasks on the weekly list and too much last-minuting and fatigue. But, where I can take this time, I do, and where I can’t I try to be more conscious of what I am doing. Usually, this takes the form of going back over the writing before I send it, deleting or editing overly long or ultimately unnecessary comments, and composing an encouraging voice-note.

I feel like the bottom line here is that I will always be fallible and get it wrong in parts, and maybe even come across as terse and mean when I never have that intention. Feedback is a conversation, and you cannot control what people hear, how they hear it and even what they do with it. But, I can control my responses and my own learning and improving. With this online life being where we are now and into the future, all I really can do is keep learning how to fail better with each student and each draft. And now you’ll have to excuse me, because I have to get back to doing exactly that!

Why are revisions so damn hard?

June 20, 2019June 14, 20191 Comment

Revisions really suck. There is no gentler or politer way to state this truth. Going back to a piece of work, long or short, that you have “finished” and realising it is nowhere near “finished”, and having to do more work on it is not something most writers look forward to. But, sitting where I am now, writing a book and having to rewrite and revisit chapters as I get feedback, I have been wondering again: why, really, are revisions so damn hard?

I think there are two dimensions to this: intellectual, and emotional. And both of these work together when we write – writing is not just a pursuit of the mind and brain. When we do research, as academic scholars, we work in areas we are interested in, passionate about, committed to, work that stimulates us both intellectually and personally. We write about issues and problems that matter to us, both intellectually and personally. That means, of course, that even though it is ‘academic’, our writing is never completely objective, or removed from our selves as the writers. There is always a subjective dimension, it is always personal.

Photo by **energepic.com** from **Pexels**

Meg Ryan has a great line in ‘You’ve Got Mail’ where she questions a comment from Joe Fox – the old ‘It’s not personal, it’s business’ line. She says: ‘Whatever anything else is, it ought to begin by being personal’. This is true of research, and academic writing: what you research and write about needs to matter to you; it needs to be personal and important. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to find the motivation and interest to keep the research going, and to keep the writing going, especially of the revisions kind.

This is my first insight into why I certainly find revisions so difficult to get to: feedback can hurt, and that hurt can create what Kate Chanock has called “emotional static”, that interferes with my ability to re-engage with my work. On a personal level, I feel I am not good enough because my writing wasn’t good enough, and I don’t even want to re-read the paper. Especially when our work is reviewed by anonymous examiners and editors, there is a great risk of getting feedback that will not be kind, or helpful, or see the good as well as what needs more work. Those with the power that comes with these evaluative roles do not always use this power for good. Revisions can be hard, then, when the feedback has been harsh, and you have to go back to work that has been trodden all over and now seems less worthy of all that time and effort.

But, even if I have asked a critical friend who I know will be constructive and helpful and kind, I find it hard to open the email, and read the comments. I had this issue constantly during my PhD, and my supervisor always gave me this kind of feedback. It was never harsh or unkind. So, why was opening that email such a fearful thing to do? I think, when I am afraid to open feedback emails, there are two things I am afraid of: one, that the feedback will be harsh in the sense that my writing (that I thought might be pretty good) has missed the mark, and I have not achieved what I thought I had. I will then have to wrestle with Imposter Syndrome feelings of self-doubt, and try to motivate myself to keep going. This makes me tired, and sad. So, in avoiding the revisions, I avoid these difficult emotions.

Photo by **rawpixel.com** from **Pexels**

The second thing I am afraid of is that my writing is actually quite good, but that there is still work to do, and this work will require more deep thinking, and reading, and re-visioning my writing. This work is not easy, or quick. And when you have “finished” a piece of writing, and have so many other things to move on to, coming back to something you had hoped would be completed, but is not, is like: ‘Seriously? When will this thing be done??’ This is both an emotional and intellectual thing – you have to push yourself to find the energy and will and interest to get back into that paper or chapter, and drive yourself on, and you have to re-think, re-vision, re-read, and re-write until you have addressed the comments and feedback properly. It makes my brain tired just thinking about it.

As so many have argued, though, myself included: revisions are part of this writing/publishing/being a scholar game. No paper or book is ever really finished – hence the “” around this word. Even when the ‘publish’ button has been pressed, people will read your work and challenge it, and question a claim you have made, or the theory you have used and so on. To be an academic researcher and writer means to have a thicker skin around putting your work out there, having it read and picked apart by peers, and having to engage with their (not always kind) feedback. We can’t just put our fingers in our ears and say ‘la-la-la-la-la’ until they go away.

I am not sure I will ever find the process of getting and reading and thinking about and working with feedback pleasurable. But, I have had the experience of reading a revised paper, after it has finally been published, and feeling much prouder of that version that I would have been if the first one had been published. So, I suppose that is pleasurable, and remembering that sense of accomplishment, and pride in myself, is a useful feeling to hold on to now, when I have revisions to do, and I am not looking forward to them. The way into re-engaging the intellectual part of the process is often through finding an emotional foothold: finding an element of pleasure in the process that you can motivate yourself with, to get back into the writing and revise the paper or chapter, and move forward.

Learning about your own writing from giving feedback

November 19, 2015April 28, 2017Leave a comment

A colleague and I are editing a book, due out next year. I have recently co-taught a course on writing a journal article to a group of postgraduate students and early-career academics. I have also just copyedited a PhD thesis, and I regularly copyedit articles for a journal I work on. This means, altogether, that I have spent most of my AcWriMo giving other people feedback on their writing, rather than doing my own writing.

From http://www.thewritingcampus.com

I have felt extremely frustrated by this, especially given that I am co-authoring a paper due to the journal by the end of January, and the writing ball is in my court right now. Giving feedback that is constructive and helpful is hard work, and it is taking a lot of mental and emotional energy that I would really rather save for my own writing. So it is hard to feel like I am doing useful or worthwhile work right now, given that my focus is on what other people are writing rather than what I am writing.

To try and alleviate some of this frustration I have been doing a little online reading about editing, and the kinds of feedback that authors find helpful. I read a fabulous article on how to make one’s writing more specific, and tighter, and this has changed the way I both write and edit. I also read a paper recently on a peer editing project with students at Rhodes University that suggested that the students learned more about how to improve their own writing from giving rather than receiving feedback. I have thus started to think about what I am learning about improving my own writing by helping others with their writing through my feedback.

The first thing I am realising is that many writers (myself included) tend to make sentences far longer and more complicated than they need to be in order to make our writing sound more ‘academic’. I think a lot has been written about obscure and verbose academic text, and how unhelpful this is for readers. Gerald Graff wrote a very engaging book about how academia works to exclude by hiding its ideas and knowledge behind obscure language that confuses as much as, or even more than, it educates. Having read Pierre Bourdieu, I am persuaded by his argument! But seriously, the more we use unnecessarily obscure and verbose language that our readers cannot make sense of, the more we exclude people from engaging with our ideas, and debating them within our research fields. Shorter, clearer sentences make your ideas clearer, and easier to follow and understand. The chances are that you as the writer are probably lost in your own confusingly long sentences too, so writing in more concise prose that gets to the heart of your ideas helps you to stay on track in making your argument, and has a better chance of leading your readers through it meaningfully. As I have been asking the writers whose work I have been editing: ‘what are you trying to say here?’, so I am now asking myself this same question as I write, and also edit, my own papers.

The second thing I am realising is that many writers don’t always consider their readers carefully enough. By the time you some to write a paper or chapter, you have done a fair bit of reading, and you are often writing about a subject you know a great deal about. Often, papers or book chapters draw on empirical data, and expand on research that the writer is immersed in. This tends to mean that many of the findings you as a writer of a paper/chapter have made, and the reasons why these matter as well as the literature you are immersed in, seem pretty obvious to you. You know them so well that you can forget, as you get caught up in the writing, that your reader does not find your research that clear or obvious. They need you to explain your thinking and research process to them in those concise, clear sentences I just talked about.

I have had this feedback recently on the theory I use in my research – generally reviewers want me to explain it to readers carefully, and in simpler terms. On reflection, I realised that they were right; I was assuming too much about what my readers understand about my research. Writers I have been working with recently have also, at certain points, slipped into making claims without citing sufficient evidence, or assuming too much on the part of readers and not explaining key terms or concepts clearly enough in the context of the argument they are making. From pointing out to them where they are losing me as a reader, or where I am doubting the credibility of their claims, I am noting for myself that these are aspects of my own writing that I need to be aware of, and keep working on.

Finally, I am realising that paying attention to formatting your work properly really helps a reader to navigate your text. For example, if all your headings look exactly the same, a reader would not be remiss in assuming that all sections are equally important, or at the same level in terms of the text structure. This is often the case, but where it is not, changes in levels or ordering of ideas should be marked by different heading levels. If you are using empirical data and quotes from that data, you need to spend some time ensuring that these are properly marked off and indented so that the reader can tell at a glance that this is data being analysed and discussed. If you have figures and tables, these need to be clear and labelled, and referred to in the text so that they contribute to the meaning you are making for your readers, rather than confusing readers. These often seem like small things, but ignoring them can make a big difference to how well a reader, editor, or reviewer receives your text.

Private Or Public Directions On A Metal Signpost

From http://www.thewritelife.com

I am not yet working on my own paper, as I hoped to be during this AcWriMo. But I have realised, in thinking about what I am actually doing with all the editing work for these other writers in terms of helping them to move from this draft to the next and on to their final drafts, that I am still working on my writing, albeit in a more general way for the time being. The more we are asked to give thoughtful, kind and critical-but-constructive responses to peers on their writing, the more we can learn about how to make our own writing less dense, more concise, and more readable. And this is kind of an AcWriMo win (even though my month is not over yet!)

	sherranclarence on Managing a mental block about…
	Dr. Michael A Boyd on Managing a mental block about…
	Jo on Managing a mental block about…
	Naomi on Managing a mental block about…
	Managing a mental bl… on What if my thesis is not The M…

How to write a PhD in a hundred steps (or more)

A workingmumscholar's journey through her PhD and beyond

Tag: feedback on writing