Some graduate students, when they have typed that last full stop in their conclu- sion chapter, print out a clean copy of the entire thesis and give the whole thing to their supervisor to read. Although this gives students a strong sense of completion,
D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_11,
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and of self-congratulation for all of the hard work they have put in, there are rea- sons why this is not a good idea. First, the supervisor should have been giving feedback chapter by chapter, and may already have expressed complete satisfaction with some chapters while asking for extensive revision to others; if a supervisor thinks a chapter is done, there is no need to ask her or him to read it again. Second, quite possibly your supervisor should only see your complete thesis after any other reviewing is complete—in particular, after you have reviewed it. If you can see that further revision is necessary, why waste your supervisor’s time doing work that you can do yourself? I recommend this not only because it is a unique and necessary experience, but also because the comments that you get back from your supervisor from a document that is in good shape will be more useful than the comments from one that is still full of problems.
Also, as noted earlier, your supervisor has many commitments, while you only have this one. Handing over the thesis chapter by chapter means that you can con- tinue to work while you wait for the feedback; a supervisor who is given a complete thesis may not return the manuscript for months.
What I do with the first draft is parallel to what I expect the examiner of a thesis would do, or what I would do if I were refereeing a paper submitted to a conference or a learned journal. The only difference is that, because I am your supervisor, I am now fairly familiar with the drift of your argument and with the approach you have taken, and I have to guard against reading things into the draft that you have not clearly explained. When you are reading your own work, this is even more of a problem. For that reason, you should put it aside for a few days before you read it as a whole.
When making a detailed review of this kind, I prefer to work on a printed copy rather than at my computer. Despite over 25 years’ experience of writing documents digitally, I find that a complex document cannot be read thoroughly in electronic form. As word-processing software improves, the advantages of hardcopy are re- duced, but it is still the case that it is easier to page through a document and annotate it on a printout than on a screen, and the brightness and relatively low resolution of screens make them much more tiring for extended reading sessions.1
On the topic of supervisor feedback, by this stage you should have formed your own judgments about how reliable it is. Some supervisors are extremely careful and give specific advice on what to fix and how to do it. Others tend to give generic advice2 that can lead an incautious student to make a mass of unnecessary changes.
A colleague of mine was tormented by his supervisor’s habit of asking for a change on one draft, then, on the next, asking for it to be changed back. The problem was that the supervisor sometimes didn’t take the time to read the work properly, and thus didn’t appreciate why things had been presented in a certain way. The lesson here, as in much of this book, is that you should be sceptical and think for yourself
1 However, my revision of this book was not printed until I had a final, ‘clean’ manuscript.
2 The dreaded ‘rewrite!’ was a comment that was often written on my thesis. I cursed my supervi- sor every time I saw it, because he used it for everything from minor errors of punctuation to major garbling of whole passages, with no hint of what the comment referred to.
about everything, not blindly follow what may be wrong information or bad advice;
especially when you know it is wrong.
Sometimes, specific advice is not appropriate; if I see some sentence or argument I don’t understand, but where I suspect the student hasn’t really thought about what they are trying to say, I may simply annotate it with a comment such as, ‘Are you sure you know what this means?’, and my students (are expected to) understand that fixing it means that, first of all, they need to try and analyze, then rectify, the problem for themselves—but also that I expect them to check with me before doing anything drastic. If the problem is subtle or complex, I’ll also include an explana- tion, because while I do want my students to develop their critical thinking skills, I don’t want them to waste their time.
My student Kari wasn’t good at handling feedback from me. She was not an experienced writer and, although she produced text quickly, it was often full of mistakes. Worse, it tended to be disorganized with bundles of unrelated thoughts gathered into the same paragraph, or the same topic discussed in multiple places, or even whole paragraphs amounting to hundreds of words repeated in different sections. Indeed, this was something like her style in conversation! She had made useful discoveries and, when pressed, could explain in an entirely coherent way exactly how the results and hypotheses related to each other, but in her writing (and speech) she often seemed to be gathering her thoughts and reaching conclusions as she went along.
By itself, I did not see this way of generating text as a problem—her approach certainly helped her to make interesting connections and guesses. What was a problem was her lack of understanding that the resulting ‘brain dump’ was unread- able. In one particularly trying instance, I spent several long evenings marking up one of her chapters in a great deal of detail, in the hope of explaining to her how to reduce her rambling but informative text to something more punchy and concise.
The feedback was in terms of grammar, word choices, organization, flow of ideas, and comments on missing or unnecessary text, which we reviewed together in a meeting. But her ego had been hurt, and after our meeting her response was to throw away the draft, including all my comments, and start again! I hadn’t made a photocopy (another lesson learned) and between us a great deal of work was lost.
The new version was not much better than the original, and, though it was hard to be sure, I felt that some of the insights were forgotten. I later found out that she had decided that my extensive comments—there was a lot of ink on her draft—were a way of telling her that the manuscript was rubbish. In other words, she overre- acted. On a smaller scale, I suspect that some degree of overreaction to supervisor feedback is common.
My student Louis made a more elementary mistake. He would make changes based on my written comments as precisely as he could, even when he couldn’t decipher them or, on reflection, they didn’t make sense. It was as if he was afraid of offending me by deviating from my observations; he had not understood that a supervisor’s comments are not instructions, but guidance.
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