Committees and dissertation directors will often offer you copious amounts of feedback as you are revising your dissertation or thesis. The need for feedback is considerable, as you are learning how to enter the conversations in your discipline and create a work that can contribute to your field.
Thus, this feedback:
- Helps you more effectively shape your arguments and engage in the literature in the field
- Helps you improve as a writer, thinker, and scholar in your discipline
- Helps you clarify your purpose and goals to readers
Everyone who is engaged in building knowledge in the field receives and navigates copious amounts of feedback. It is one of the ways that we produce human knowledge.
The goal of all feedback is to improve your work so it can A) be the best it can be and B) make a contribution to your discipline. Revision may constitute 70% or more of your writing time. This is normal and expected. It is not uncommon for dissertation and thesis writers to revise a single chapter 2-5 times based on advisor committee feedback.
Managing Feedback on Drafts
Once you receive feedback, it is important to develop strategies for managing it. Here are several to consider.
Strategy 1: Emotional Responses to Feedback
Receiving feedback can be an emotional experience, and sometimes, before you can effectively revise, you need to manage your emotional responses to feedback. Remember that feedback represents your text, not you as a person.
- If you are upset or frustrated by the feedback, set your comments aside for a few days before looking at your manuscript or doing revisions.
- Use self-care strategies to work through your emotions, recognizing that writing is an emotional and high-stakes process.
- Recognize that issues like “imposter syndrome” (where you feel you do not belong) or low self-efficacy (feeling you can’t do this) are common among graduate students. Don’t let these issues stop you from making good progress on your drafts.
- Seek help on managing anxiety and stress from IUP’s counseling center
Strategy 2: Summarizing Feedback and Creating a Revision Plan
Once you are ready to revise your work, it is helpful to take the time to create a revision plan. This allows you to take the feedback step by step and not get overwhelmed by the process.
- Re-read the chapter and review the feedback.
- Using a three-column table in Word, cut and paste the specific feedback (or summarize it in your own words). Put all the similar feedback in the same cell so you can do the revisions at the same time (see table on next page).
- Respond to the feedback
- Create an action plan. Then, when you go to revise you can use this like a “list” to check off revisions as you make them.
- This can also be used to share the revisions with your advisor or committee (who appreciate a list of what you’ve done and how).
If you are confused or want clarification about specific feedback items, consider sending part of your revision plan to your advisor, or bringing your revision plan and feedback to the Writing Center for feedback from their tutors.
Feedback item: The argument I am trying to make appears “buried” and unavailable to readers.
My revision Plan: Examine my first chapter closely and build in a more explicit argument, including through.
Actual revisions and notes: Revision to abstract; revision to first paragraph, new paragraph after purpose statement.
Strategy 3: Integrate Feedback into the Draft
In addition to your revision plan, it can be helpful to transfer your specific feedback items into your draft (in the correct location) if they are not there already.
- If you receive feedback orally, as email, or as a separate text document not tied to your draft, you should put the feedback in your draft at an appropriate place.
- Then, as you address the feedback, you can resolve the comment or use the strikethrough feature to address it.
- You can also do this with specific items tied to your revision plan.
Strategy 4: Review, Track, and Get Support
If there are parts of the revisions or feedback that confuse you, it is better to have a clear plan moving forward rather than trying to work without knowing where you are going.
- Ask for clarifications from your advisor and/or committee if there is feedback that is unclear to you.
- Before you send revisions back to your committee and advisor, it is appropriate to share your revisions with your peers, a writing center tutor, or a graduate writing group.
- As you are completing your revisions, we strongly suggest making a bullet point list of exactly what you are doing and why (no more than 1-2 pages total). This allows you to share this with your advisor or committee and can facilitate more productive meetings and defenses. Advisors and committee members appreciate a direct discussion of how you have made revisions.
What about Disagreement?
Sometimes when you receive feedback on a manuscript, you may disagree with the feedback, either feeling that your work wasn’t interpreted as you meant it or you have a conceptual disagreement with your advisor/committee. Regardless of the feelings you have, you still need to address the feedback. Here are our suggestions:
Option 1: Clarification
You may have a disagreement because you haven’t provided enough information to the reader, have written your argument clearly enough, or the reader had a misunderstanding of what you were trying to convey.
- It is common that there can be a disconnection between what you thought you conveyed vs. what is actually conveyed.
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- You may have not fully developed a line of thinking or not provided enough evidence to support your claims. Check that your claims and arguments are very clearly stated.
- Sometimes these issues are organizational in nature, and clearer organization, signposting, and transitions can greatly help. Work to re-organize, paying attention to topic sentences, transitions, and signposts.
- Usually, clarifying your points, data analysis, arguments, and so on can clear up this kind of misunderstanding. It may be the case that substantial revisions or additional materials are needed to make sure your committee understands where you are heading.
Option 2: Conceptual Disagreement
Another source of disagreement is that you have a conceptual disagreement with the committee/your advisor on an aspect of your project. This means that you disagree on a fundamental interpretation or aspect of the project.
- If this is the case, talk with your advisor and see if you can come to a solution that all can agree upon.
- You can sometimes strengthen your claims and clarify your position, but a conceptual agreement may need to be resolved with a revision on your part.
- Recognize that this is common and that writers (dissertation/thesis writers, those writing articles/grants/etc.) often need to compromise in order to have their work complete. (A good dissertation is a finished dissertation!)
Handling Different Kinds of Feedback
Here are some of the most common problems that graduate students face during revising their work and some tips for addressing these issues.
Literature Review and/or Results: Too much Detail
One common piece of feedback that graduate students get is that your work offers too much detail. Remember:
- You should not cite everything that you have read. Cite only material that is directly relevant to your purpose and study. Consider yourself a “curator” of the literature.
- You should organize material in a way that clearly builds to your study, often in a general to specific format (see the JWWC’s Literature Review Presentation)
- Remove long quotations and summarize many studies in one place (again, see our literature review presentation)
- Look at your data presentation. Don’t present everything you found; present only the most relevant of your findings. Talk with your advisor about what to include and what to omit.
- Too much detail and length is taxing on readers and can lead to confusion; it pays to be clear, direct, and brief as much as you are able. Say it in 10 pages rather than 30 if at all possible.
Moving from Summary to Argument
Another common piece of feedback is that you are presenting a summary and are not making an argument.
- Arguments come in many forms, but often they include:
- Your own mapping and discussion of the literature of the field that is relevant; your interpretations of what areas may be gaps/need more research
- Your articulation of the role your study plays in addressing the present gaps or blind spots in the field
- Your articulation of what contributions your study makes to the field
Lack of Clarity in Methods
Clarifying and expanding the methods section can sometimes address methodological feedback. But other methodological feedback may be inherent flaws in your approach itself and is best dealt with by providing a clearer indication of the limitations of the study.
Issues with Writing Results
Not having enough data, having too much data, or having your data not match your claims are common problems here. Multiple times, this kind of feedback encourages you to question your presentation or your analysis. Sometimes, this means going back into your data for better examples and for additional analysis. And sometimes it means doing a considerable amount of cutting to get to the core data that is important to build the field.
Grammar and Style
Graduate students also frequently get comments on their use of language and on grammar and punctuation. Wendy Belcher offers these core principles in her Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks book (2019, p 310).
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- Brevity: Don’t use two words where one will do; conciseness is a very valuable writing skill to learn and employ in your writing)
- Vigor: Don’t use a noun when you can use a verb; nominalizations can bog down your prose)
- Potency: Don’t use a weak verb when you can use a strong verb. verbs should be clear)
- Dynamism: Don’t use the passive voice unless the subject is unknown or unimportant
- Lucidity: Don’t use a pronoun when a noun would be clearer
- Efficiency: Don’t use a preposition when you can use a noun or verb
- Leanness: Don’t use an adjective or adverb unless you must
- Specificity: Don’t use a general world when you can use a specific one
Tips and Tricks for Revision
Recognize that there are differences between revision and editing/polishing your work. You will want to revise your work before you start to address the grammar and sentence-level issues.
Revision
Revision is an often messy, iterative process where you discover the story you are telling, hone your ideas, organize and reorganize, and focus heavily on figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it.
- At this stage, many writers choose to pay less attention to grammar/punctuation and word choice—because it’s the idea stage.
- You may think you are done with this stage and then your committee’s feedback may require you to back into the idea stage and make considerable and large-scale changes to the text.
Editing
When you have your overall content and, in some order, this is often when you start refining it at a sentence and paragraph level. This is typically done as you are preparing for defenses and/or at later stages in writing.