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.