How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis
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From First <strong>to</strong> Second Draft <br />
127<br />
about everything, not blindly follow what may be wrong information or bad advice;<br />
especially when you know it is wrong.<br />
Sometimes, specific advice is not appropriate; if I see some sentence or argument<br />
I don’t understand, but where I suspect the student hasn’t really thought about what<br />
they are trying <strong>to</strong> say, I may simply annotate it with a comment such as, ‘Are you<br />
sure you know what this means?’, and my students (are expected <strong>to</strong>) understand<br />
that fixing it means that, first of all, they need <strong>to</strong> try and analyze, then rectify, the<br />
problem for themselves—but also that I expect them <strong>to</strong> check with me before doing<br />
anything drastic. If the problem is subtle or complex, I’ll also include an explanation,<br />
because while I do want my students <strong>to</strong> develop their critical thinking skills, I<br />
don’t want them <strong>to</strong> waste their time.<br />
My student Kari wasn’t good at handling feedback from me. She was not an<br />
experienced writer and, although she produced text quickly, it was often full of<br />
mistakes. Worse, it tended <strong>to</strong> be disorganized with bundles of unrelated thoughts<br />
gathered in<strong>to</strong> the same paragraph, or the same <strong>to</strong>pic discussed in multiple places,<br />
or even whole paragraphs amounting <strong>to</strong> hundreds of words repeated in different<br />
sections. Indeed, this was something like her style in conversation! She had made<br />
useful discoveries and, when pressed, could explain in an entirely coherent way<br />
exactly how the results and hypotheses related <strong>to</strong> each other, but in her writing (and<br />
speech) she often seemed <strong>to</strong> be gathering her thoughts and reaching conclusions as<br />
she went along.<br />
By itself, I did not see this way of generating text as a problem—her approach<br />
certainly helped her <strong>to</strong> make interesting connections and guesses. What was a<br />
problem was her lack of understanding that the resulting ‘brain dump’ was unreadable.<br />
In one particularly trying instance, I spent several long evenings marking up<br />
one of her chapters in a great deal of detail, in the hope of explaining <strong>to</strong> her how <strong>to</strong><br />
reduce her rambling but informative text <strong>to</strong> something more punchy and concise.<br />
The feedback was in terms of grammar, word choices, organization, flow of ideas,<br />
and comments on missing or unnecessary text, which we reviewed <strong>to</strong>gether in a<br />
meeting. But her ego had been hurt, and after our meeting her response was <strong>to</strong><br />
throw away the draft, including all my comments, and start again! I hadn’t made a<br />
pho<strong>to</strong>copy (another lesson learned) and between us a great deal of work was lost.<br />
The new version was not much better than the original, and, though it was hard <strong>to</strong><br />
be sure, I felt that some of the insights were forgotten. I later found out that she had<br />
decided that my extensive comments—there was a lot of ink on her draft—were<br />
a way of telling her that the manuscript was rubbish. In other words, she overreacted.<br />
On a smaller scale, I suspect that some degree of overreaction <strong>to</strong> supervisor<br />
feedback is common.<br />
My student Louis made a more elementary mistake. He would make changes<br />
based on my written comments as precisely as he could, even when he couldn’t<br />
decipher them or, on reflection, they didn’t make sense. It was as if he was afraid<br />
of offending me by deviating from my observations; he had not unders<strong>to</strong>od that a<br />
supervisor’s comments are not instructions, but guidance.