Hi, everybody, and welcome to this week's coaching call. This is a deep dive where I take a topic that has come up in the community or that people have questions about, and I, you guessed it, dive deep into answering that question. And this question was about feedback, asking for feedback from your advisors, what kinds of feedback you can get if it needs to come to your advisors. And I've even thrown in a little bit about what to do with some common sort of tough types of feedback that you might get from your advisor. So with all of that being said, I am so excited to just go ahead and dive in to this week's coaching call on types of feedback. So, I want to acknowledge upfront that feedback can be really complicated, especially when you make the jump from an undergraduate program, and even sometimes a master's program into a PhD. Because you might be used to feedback as what you get after the papers done as a grade. And we'll talk a little bit about those types in a second. But feedback, once you're in the PhD, really switches into something that goes along the whole process. And it can be just as brutal as some of the grading type feedback, but you're meant to sort of take it and learn from it. And that requires a whole new set of skills, asking for feedback at different times and in different ways. And then also processing that feedback, especially if it's coming from people who aren't necessarily trained. And most people aren't in giving feedback that's actually constructive and useful. So today in the call, we're going to talk about different types of feedback that you can ask for at different stages of a writing process. What you can ask for what is reasonable from various people, whether those are your advisors, committee members, mentors, writing groups, peers, etc. And then we're gonna go through a little bit of what happens when that feedback comes back, and how you might want to work with it. So I am going to put on my learning development hat for a second. Some of you might know, I think I've mentioned it a couple of times that I worked extensively at the Center for teacher teaching and learning at my university when I was a PhD student. And one of the things that I specialized in was feedback, not just grades, but sort of feedback is an overall pedagogical practice. So forgive me, but I'm going to talk about these two different types, because I think it actually helps to illuminate where a lot of the disconnect is for many of the people that I talked to. So most of us are used to what is called summative feedback, this is the feedback that comes at the end of a process. So examples of summative feedback could be grades, acceptances, the comments after a talk the notes from a journal, whether they sort of pass it, you know, revise and resubmit or they reject it. But the specific thing about this is that it comes at the end of the process. So you do all of the work. And then it's evaluative. And sometimes you can hear this referred to as evaluative feedback to it isn't meant to shape or create or change it in any way. It's just grading it against a curve. And sometimes that grade has actual ramifications. And sometimes it's just verbal or an other kind of feedback. But summative feedback, the important thing to know about it is that there's really nothing that you can do after that's done, right. Like if you get a final grade in a class, that tells you where you are on the spectrum of how you might have performed on that class. But there's really nothing you can do. After that last final is taken, you just can kind of learn from it and apply it to the next thing. So this is the feedback that most of us are used to receiving, especially in undergrads where you will turn in an assignment and then you get a grade for it. And you can take that learning and use it on the next assignment. But unless the class is specifically designed in a way to build and sort of get feedback all along the way, you're usually receiving feedback at the end of a certain process or assignment or unit. And then it's meant to help you gauge what you should do for the next time, study harder, revise a little bit more, et cetera, et cetera. What happens when you're used to this kind of feedback, outside of other feedback is that it can feel really, really high stakes all of the time. So if your advisor asked to see an early draft, and they you give it to them, and they come back with feedback that you feel like it's harsh, well, then wow, that's gonna feel awful for you, maybe because it will feel like wow, this was the end of the process. This is me getting a grade, so to speak. This is how I'm meant to judge it. But there is another kind of feedback. And this is called formative feedback. So when I have my teaching development hat on, and I am working with instructors, I really really stress formative feedback and feedback all the way A from the instant that your students jump in the door to sort of the last final grade, because formative feedback is meant to shape the outcome. So if you have a an ungraded pop quiz at the start of every class that will give a student a pretty good judge of whether or not they understood the reading. If they failed the quiz because they either didn't do the reading or they didn't understand it, well, then that's a good gut check moment for them that they need to change how they're going about the reading or about their time management skills, but it's not going to hurt them in the class, because it's ungraded. It's a way for them to shape the outcome of how they're participating in that class. formative feedback, as a PhD student is meant to help you shape the outcome of your research of a grant proposal of a paper. And that's why we are often submitting for feedback rather than grades. I know that once I got out of coursework, I didn't really get any more meaningful grades anymore. I just got comments on papers, and various other things to sort of evaluate. And so even though my nervous system wanted to be like, Okay, tell me did I get an A or an A minus on this paper, the reality was that I had a bunch of feedback to process that was meant to shape the outcome of how I approached that project going forward. It can help you gauge your, your process and your progress. So you know that if you get feedback on an early draft, and your advisor says, wow, there's four dissertations worth of ideas in just this one chapter, that's going to shape the way that you move through the rest of the research process and the drafting and revision, it forms the work as it progresses. So in theory, this is lower stakes feedback, because it isn't an endpoint, it comes somewhere along the process where you still have time to absorb it, process it and change it. So knowing that most of the feedback that you're getting as a PhD student is formative can be a really helpful sort of switch moment, because it can say, Okay, this isn't me getting graded as much as it's this is me getting feedback meant to shape this process. Now, I'm not here to say that that switch is easy, or that your nervous system is necessarily good at discerning the difference between those two things, because all of us crave a little bit of evaluation and validation, right. But the more that you can think about the feedback as formative, the better off, I find that it is because it makes it easier for it to ask for easier to process when you get it and easier to work into your process like it was intended. As opposed to a high stakes. Either I did well on this or I didn't. And I don't really have a chance to do it again, approach to it. So knowing that there are various kinds of feedback, and what you're not doing is submitting drafts to your advisors for quote unquote, grades, then it can be useful to talk about the different levels of feedback that you can get. And this is specifically sort of geared toward writing. And you'll notice that the levels that I outlined here, reflect that. But you can think about what other sorts of levels you might get feedback on in terms of say, like your research design, or the way that you're preparing for your comps, you know, you'll have to use your imagination a little bit to tweak it. But it's useful to think about these levels of feedback at various stages in the process. So the first level that many of us go to, and we want often early is feedback on the content. Did I include what I was supposed to? Did I talk about the right things? Does it make sense? Is it compelling? Is it interesting, this is content only. So you could get feedback just on the ideas and they wouldn't focus on the the sentence structure the way that even you organized it necessarily. It would just be focused on the ideas how compelling they are, and whether or not they've you've got what you need in there. Sort of next level down is structure, which is is it structured? Well, is it easy to follow? Does it make sense? Do I as a reader understand how I'm moving through this piece? Or is it like my early drafts where it's like, well, this is kind of a chaotic, wandering through a bunch of random thoughts. So structure is one level underneath content, and then flow. You know, does it make sense? Does it flow? Is it equally compelling? Does it have a beginning, middle and end? These are all questions that might be more or less relevant.
You can also ask about argument, does this feel well supported? Does this feel compelling? Does this feel like it has a high enough sense of stakes? These are all of the things that we talk about in terms of like argumentative writing, for example, and then underneath that is style. does is it written in an appropriate academic style? Do you like the way that my son sentences flow. Do you like the balance between research and anecdotes? Do you like how I use my participant voices here? Style, as you might sort of discern from the questions that I'm asking, often is a personal preference to so knowing that people can give you feedback on your style, and that you don't necessarily need to take it is, you know, a liberating thought for some of us. And then last, but not least, is the level of spelling and grammar. And inside of this Allah, I would also put like, foot off formatting, you know, citational, practices, things like that, where it's literally the kind of nuts and bolts of did I put the sentence together? Are these verbs conjugated in the right way? Did I misspell the word achievement? 100 million times, which I always do, I never get that one, right. So knowing that all of these levels of feedback are things that you could ask somebody about your writing can be really, really helpful, because most advisors have some sort of preference as to where they like to give feedback, you might have an A an advisor, or a committee member that says I only want to see polished drafts, which, okay, that's great. But if they have comments about the content, then you might have to scrap half of that chapter, and then add something else in. Because it's a really high level of feedback, when there may be expecting to only be commenting on like the argument, the style and the the formatting issues. And vice versa. You might have an advisor who's really great at talking you through the sort of way that it should shape with the literature and what things to include or not include, or how you should break the content up between different chapters. And they might not be skilled at all, in helping you make it so that it's smooth, or that it flows well or that it's compelling. Different people are able to give different kinds of feedback, different parts in the process will give you different parts of the process. So knowing that there are different levels that you can ask for can be really, really helpful. Because the number one tip that I have for managing feedback with advisors is to be clear about what you're asking for and why. Now, a big post it note right here, your advisor might not be open to giving you feedback in a different way than they want to, for example, I begged my advisor to look at drafts when they were earlier or when there were still parts that had bullet points in them. Because I really wanted help with the content and the structure and wasn't moving in the right direction. And she refused to look at anything until it was really polished, which meant that I felt really lost for like big parts of the writing process, because it couldn't get any feedback to help me shape the process as I was going. Some advisors though, just don't know what you're looking for until you ask. So you will have to kind of like use this. Your mileage may vary, as they say, with this specific advice. But I have seen people absolutely do wonders to their relationship with their advisor by saying, Hey, I'm sending you this subsection, or I'm sending you this draft, feel free to ignore any of the stylistic or spelling things. I will work on all of that later. But here are my specific questions. Does it flow? Well? Is the argument compelling? Are there any literature resources that you feel like I should include that I haven't. And then your advisor doesn't need to cover it in reading. And maybe that's feedback that's better given in a meeting or verbally, or they can type some things out in an email, or they might send you a couple of citations of stuff to look at. But knowing that you can ask for different levels of feedback is really, really helpful. But the So change the ask, depending on where you are in the process is, you know, more appropriate to ask for things I would say are probably higher level. And the further on that you get, you might want more support and the things that are more closer to the stylistic end of the spectrum. Now let's answer the question is your advisor, the only person who can give you feedback? I would say no. And I actually would strongly encourage almost everybody to seek out a wider pool of feedback. Some people have a unicorn advisor and they're as great and skilled at editing their writing and giving feedback as they are running their labs or preparing them for PrEP professionally or connecting them with the network. And if you have a unicorn, amazing, I'm so happy for you. You know pay it forward. Being a unicorn advisor yourself, but most of us are dealing with advisors that aren't necessarily trained in writing pedagogy or giving effective feedback or even their own writing process. I know that I asked several of my advisors and committee members like how do you approach this part of your writing process? This, and they literally couldn't tell me because it wasn't ever something that they thought about. And I probably my hunch is that they don't have a good system for it either. So they couldn't advise me on something they don't themselves do. I firmly believe that early drafts, the earlier the draft, the less your advisor needs to be involved. This is a bold, tick, hashtag heartache. So, you know, again, take what's useful and leave the rest. But I had an amazing experience sharing my draft widely with people in and outside of my field, when it was in rough states, I did it with writing groups, sometimes interdisciplinary, sometimes people in my program, I did it with my partner who was not an academic at all, I sometimes shared it with various people that I knew professionally in the Teaching and Learning Center, for example, but the earlier on that you need that sort of support, the more I think that your advisor doesn't need to necessarily be the person that you get that from your writing group, for example, my writing group, I was immediate scholar, my writing group was full of in early religious scholar who worked on papyrus translations of different gospels. And we also were with a cultural anthropologist, and so we didn't have any shared disciplinary speak whatsoever, but I would share my early drafts with them. And they would tell me, this part's really interesting. I got really confused here, I didn't understand what you were saying, can you explain this back to me, and it was so helpful to have somebody else's thoughts and input on the sort of skeleton of my writing, of course, they weren't going to be able to tell me, Hey, you're missing this big citation here, or this isn't exactly what I think this author means, or I had a different understanding of this particular term in our literature. But for all of the basic stuff of just like is this writing that a person can read and generally follow, it was so helpful to have them there, I find that most advisors, most advisors do not necessarily want to be involved in the early formation, levels of feedback inside of projects, they want to look at drafts, they want to see things once they're developed. And I think part of that is, advisors want you to have the sort of freedom to develop and figure out your own process. But I also think it's just a time sink thing that they don't necessarily want to they have a very short sighted vision, that they're like, I want you to do all of this work and come back when you're ready for me not knowing that sometimes that earlier, formative feedback can mean that the later drafts are going to be so much closer to what they actually expect. So if you were listening to the levels of feedback and thinking like, wow, it would be a dream, if my advisor could do that, and you know, that they're just not going to be able to, then I really encourage you to find other people because getting eyes and feedback on early drafts is one of the biggest game changers. So speaking of advisor feedback, I want to address three different types of advisor feedback that are pretty common, and sort of different strategies to deal with them. Because like I said, most advisors, Chair, members, committee members, faculty members, in general, are not necessarily trained in giving feedback on writing to scholars of our field. And so they either replicate what they would want, they grade it like they would grade an undergraduate paper.
It's a skill and lots of people haven't developed it. So I've kind of built these three sort of buckets of feedback behavior types, you might recognize some of them, if you don't, exciting, you've never done it, but at least then you know that you can not do them yourselves, too. So the first is what I call fire hose feedback, where a faculty member I sort of imagined them, they receive a draft, they print it out, they sharpen up their red pen, you know, they refill their fountain pen, or they get their sharpest, Porteus red pen out. And they proceed to cover every inch of that draft with every thought that they had while they were reading it. So they might be correcting your grammar and filling the margins with different papers that they think you can read and circling things and adding question marks but like just imagine a fire hose where it's a high pressure blast all over your draft. The problem with Firehose feedback is the faculty member is they sit and I imagine again, this is how I sort of imagined it going, that they're like wow, I'm such a generous advisor. I just spent three hours going over every word of this draft and out downloading every single thought that I have about what they should do with it. They're so lucky to have me which is you don't true that is a very generous outlay of time, however to be the person who receives the draft that's like suddenly three pounds heavier because of the weight of the added ink, and all of the things, it is super, super overwhelming to get all of that feedback at once. And have it be at so many different levels, and not really be sure, like what's most important or like, what are the big three things that can change, or worse, you know, they give you all this feedback and they want it back in a week. And you're like, wow, it's gonna take me a week to even like read all of these different comments. So if you are the recipient of firehouse feedback, the first thing that I encourage that you do is that you sit down and you make some sort of categorization for that feedback. I personally like a three tiered system, where I say, okay, in the first column are these are things that are good suggestions, I read them? And I'm like, Yeah, that's a good point, I'm definitely going to address that. There's a middle column for whom that could work. I'm not really sure. It probably depends on what I do in the other places where you don't necessarily know if it's gonna work or not, but you put it in that column, it's not a slam dunk that yes, you want to address it. But it's also not a hard No, either. Which brings us to our third column, which is a hard note. Where they might say, like, hey, I really want you to do this. And you're like, I'm not going to do that. And it is your prerogative as a PhD student to not do things. Sometimes feedback is not necessarily an order form, it is feedback about what they would do if they were you, if you're the writer, but they're not you. So there are some things that you might want to put in the column that you're just simply not going to address, and then work with the feedback in order. So do all of the things that you know that you want to address, and then sort of make your way through, because what I often find is that by addressing some of the higher level things, including content, maybe restructuring, changing the format, really tweaking the argument, a lot of the stuff really ripples down. And so if you go, how many of us sort of like instinctually, would we start at the beginning of that feedback, and we just sort of resolve each comment, comment by comment, you can get really lost in the sauce, you can get really disoriented, because you're working at all of these levels. And you're changing things in the first couple of pages that are going to impact the whole thing. So it can be easier to go from the level of content down to spelling and grammar. And to do the things that you know, you want to change first and then see if that makes some of the other stuff less necessary or something that you don't need to address anymore. The good news about firehouse feedback is that I find that the faculty member that gives it or the person who gives it often does not remember ever, all of those suggestions, they might have two or three that they really do remember, but because it was so much volume, it's not. It's a little bit easier to have those two columns of like, I'm not sure if I'm going to address this room in a wait and see, because they don't necessarily remember all, you know, literal 500 comments that they made on this particular chapter paper or whatever. So the bad news about Firehose said it's super overwhelming and chaotic to work through. But the good news is that it usually isn't a you must do this or else. Okay, type two is what I call fixation feedback, where you have a a person who's reading your work. And for one reason or another, they just get fixated on a specific idea that my advisor used to get just fixated on the passive voice, which is a specific grammar, grammatical choice, that I would make sure I made it too often, probably, but it also wasn't grammatically incorrect. And they just would go through and cover every one of my papers with just like pointing out every time I use the passive voice and telling me not to do it to the exclusion of actually reading it for content or for, you know, argument or whatever else. I've seen people get fixated on certain word choices or fixated on you, including or addressing a specific piece of literature. And then every three pages, they're like, What about the content? What about the content, and you didn't address the cons, like you might do it later, but like, they just get fixated on something. The good news about fixation feedback is that it's usually something where it's relatively easy to address because you just fix wherever they think it should be. And then you know, it doesn't trip their alarm of what they're looking for. The bad news about it is that if it's something that they commented on every page of your 50 page chapter draft, it probably is something that you're either going to need to address, or have a conversation about, because that's it's less likely that they're going to forget that they told you to do that, if they told you on every single page. The last category that it's useful to sort of be aware of are the people where you know, you're going to be forced to accept some of this feedback. This happens a lot it with literature, where it's just like, I don't think I need to address this piece, but you seem really certain so I'm going to add two sentences that do it. Or I You and I disagree. Sorry about the way that I'm using this specific term. And I'm just going to accept the way that you want me to do it because it's not worth fighting about it. So forced to accept feedback is similar to fixation feedback, where it's less likely that they're going to forget that you do it. But it can feel sometimes even more sticky than some of the other kinds of feedback, because it's not the choice that you would make as a writer. But I like to always share with people that like dissertations and theses in a lot of ways are the longest documents that you will ever write to the smallest audience as possible. Many of us are writing, if not directly to an advisor, and then a committee or a very small subsection of our field. And there might just be some things that they need to see or they're not going to pass it or they're not going to let it go, or they're going to get fixated on it for some reason or not. So it does feel crappy to be like, Wow, I had all of this agency, this is my specific project. And now I have to just do what you say. But I find that sometimes not every battle is worth fighting. So obviously, if you have an ethical concern, or you know, it's really something you want to go to the mat for, do it. You know, fight your fights, win your battles, I am in no way suggesting that you need to take every piece of feedback that comes across your desk and integrate all of it. But know that in my experience, specifically in dissertations, and sometimes in edited, you know, articles, but less frequently, this is really a thing that happens in dissertations, sometimes you're just going to have to do what they say, and you're going to be like this paragraph is stupid, I don't want to write it. But I will just do that you will stop talking about how much I need to cite this other thing. So I want to normalize those as normal types of feedback. There's annoying to get if not worse than annoying, but they're usually workable, and there's usually strategies to help you address them. But I'm gonna close with a tool that I have found extremely useful in my own editing and revision choices. So after I get feedback, in case you are not aware, it is common when you submit an article to a journal or some sort of other publication that gets peer reviewed, and you get your reviews back. And then if it comes back with a revise and resubmit, often, you revise the piece and as part of the resubmitting process, you include what's called an editor response letter, it might be called something slightly different in your field. But it's usually some variation on an editor response or comment or response letter, where you basically go through and you say, thank you generous reviewers for your time and energy, blah, blah, blah. And then you kind of go point by point and address what things you did take up of their feedback and what things you didn't. It's a meta commentary on your revision.
You know, to sum up, why you made the changes you did and why you didn't make the changes that you did not. So it's a place to kind of justify what you're doing and what you're not doing based on other people's feedback. So I love editor response letters as a framework for thinking about preparing for conversations after the feedback, because it is not your job necessarily to respond and do everything that somebody who gives you feedback suggest that you do, you might say thank you for that suggestion, here's why I have chosen not to do it. And then you can explain that actually, in the discipline that I'm working in X, Y, or Z, or I've chosen not to include this framework, because I don't agree with x or sort of Whatever your reasons are. But the difference between like a grade dispute where you go back, and you sort of say like, I'm you were wrong about this, and I want you to change my grade. And this kind of a framework is that it gives you back the agency. So instead of saying, like, I just do whatever my adviser says, or I don't do anything, and I don't get any feedback, and this thing is exclusively mine, it kind of gives you a chance to reflect on what things you did do and what things you don't. These editor response letters, if you write them even just for a free write response and like prompt for yourself, they can be excellent prep for things like defenses or meetings with your advisor when you go back over a draft or revision, because then you have some sort of notes about why you chose not to do the things you didn't do and why you chose to do the things you did. You make so many decisions as part of a writing process that thinking about an editor response letter. When you're working through major revisions, especially the feedback that you're choosing not to incorporate, is a really empowering move that often helps you remember and sort of argue your case more forcefully. But overall, with feedback, I want you to remember it if there's nothing else that you take away from this call. I want you to take this away that writing at this level in the academy in this level of scholarship, generating new knowledge, which is literally what you're doing when you're writing down original Research. No one gets that exactly right on the first draft, I promise you that there is no such thing as like a, I did this and it was amazing. And because so many of us are coming from places where we take any feedback as a direct evaluation of how well we're doing and how good the work is, and whether or not we deserve to do it, all of that sort of learned and conditioned and culturally conditioned impostor syndrome and all of the rest of it. Our nervous systems react like it's a grade. But often feedback is there, whether or not it's the most compassionately intended, feedback is there to help improve the process and the progress and to help you shape it as it grows. So get get feedback when you can, how you can from as wide an audience as it makes sense for you. But know that feedback is part of the process at this level. And that you might come to even like I did start to really enjoy getting feedback, not from everyone, I never enjoyed getting feedback from my advisor who was, you know, fixated on the passive voice. But I came to really appreciate my writing group and my colleagues that would read my work, because their feedback was my best and most efficient way to see how my ideas were working out side of the kind of playground of my brain. And inside of theirs, it helped me draft faster, it helped me revise faster, it helped me feel more confident, and it made me a better writer. So feedback is definitely scary. But know that you can ask for different kinds of feedback than you're getting. You may or may not get it. But it's worth the ask that there are ways to deal with difficult kinds of form, feedback, and that nobody gets it right. And feedback is always part of the process. And it's less about getting it right and more about shaping it toward the requirements of whatever the thing is that you're working on. Thank you so much for joining me on this coaching call. And I can't wait to see you around the community. Bye everybody. You
