I recently received some unhelpful written feedback. I say “unhelpful” not because the reviewer misinterpreted my writing or didn’t try to help or that I believed my writing was perfect. The feedback was just written in a way that didn’t help me.
For example, one sentence I wrote was ” this view implies that programs aimed at developing people’s characteristics are more effective than programs aimed at improving circumstantial factors”. The word “programs” was highlighted, with a comment “what programs?” (um, programs that “aimed at…”?)
For another example, I wrote “grant the claim that there are systematic behavioural differences between individuals who score high and low on the grit scale (CITATION)”. The phrase “grit scale” is highlighted with a comment “explain/define”. (um, the citation was to the paper where this scale is developed. What more can I give as a definition?)
There were numerous small comments like this. I sent it to a couple of friends for a sanity check, and they all agree with me that, while it was clear that the reviewer was confused by my writing (which means I should improve somehow), it also sounded like they were mad when they read my stuff and decided to be as uncharitable as they could.
This was a strange conclusion, because I had met this person (this isn’t in the context of blind review for journals), and they struck me as incredibly kind, caring, and candid. I also gave them plenty of turn around time at what I think is a low season.
I ended up meeting them in person to clarify some of the comments. I was proud of myself for doing it — past-me would’ve just concluded that I’m not cut out for this and left it at that. Even now, my first instinct was that they were clearly not interested in helping me improve, and so I should just get feedback elsewhere. But a friend convinced me to give this a try.
I think I hid my discontent very well by phrasing everything in terms of “I can see that I have not provided some information you need to understand me, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what that information is, because it’s clearly not this piece of information I thought I provided in this sentence.” But perhaps I didn’t do as good of a job as I thought I did. In any case, it was clear that they didn’t expect their comment to be confusing, either. When they wrote “what programs?”, they wanted something like “government programs” or “after school programs”. When they wrote “explain/define”, it was because they didn’t know what a “scale” is in this (interdisciplinary) setting.
When I first started grading essays as a TA, I gave comments like these: a large number of short phrases most of which are “clarify”, “what do you mean?”, “how does this follow?” I did this for several years. The comments I received on my own writing were like this, too. My students didn’t act on it and neither did I.
My year as the graduate writing consultant was the year that really changed how I understand comment-giving. Because I had them right there with me when I read their work, and because we were academic equals (I was a grad student; most people I served were also grad students, some more senior than me, some post-docs, too), they were able to ask questions that were really difficult to answer. When I say “it doesn’t follow”, they ask “why not? I used ‘therefore’ already.” Then I have to figure out why it doesn’t follow. And when I explained it to them, they’d say “oh that makes a lot of sense!… but how do I change that if this is what I want to say?” So I had to figure out how to change it on the spot.
I now give comments in a completely different way. I’d like to think that my comments are more constructive and easier to swallow than the stream of short phrases and question marks, but that’s hard for me to tell. What is true is that my current way of comment-giving takes a lot more work than the stream of short phrases. There is a case to be made that commentors shouldn’t need to spend this much time cushioning feedback for authors, or that constructive comments are best given in-person anyway. I’ll leave that aside. For those who want to change how they give comments, I’ll share some practices I’ve used and found helpful.
1. Force yourself to write paragraph commentary rather than in-line comments
Of course, for something like final-version in-line editing, you’d have to do it in-line. But I think comments like “expand on this idea” or “define this term” are better done in a stand-alone commentary paragraph. One reason is that, if there is an undefined term here, the best place to define it is usually elsewhere. Another reason is that this practice forces you to look at all of your comments holistically, which helps with the two points below.
2. Try to figure out the reason behind the problem
The main problem with my writing that received the comments I quoted earlier in this post is that I was pitching my writing at the level of [philosophers of science outside of my narrow specialty], whereas I really should be pitching to [non-philosophers and non-scientists]. Once I understood this, I not only knew how to “explain/define” the grit scale, I also knew that I needed to restructure the order of information I presented. This is probably a much better strategy than if I added a half-sentence definition at every place that was marked with “explain/define” (there were quite a few places).
When I comment on student writings, I’d write things like “you are approaching literature review as if you’re trying to tell me everything about the papers. Instead, you should only talk about the parts that are relevant to your thesis, and frame them in a way that makes it obvious why your thesis arises”. In a sense, this is me guessing the author’s intention, and sometimes I guess wrong. But even if I guess wrong, it frames the problem in a more “means-ends” way (e.g. which word should I use to signal that this is what the paper says but I disagree?) as opposed to simply saying “irrelevant”, which can be interpreted as a general attack on one’s writing.
3. Try to think through some action items
This one takes a lot of effort, and so I really only do it for people whom I’m pretty confident would appreciate it. Instead of writing “I can’t follow this argument”, I’d need to reread the surrounding passages a few times to figure out what the argument could have been, and then figure out what it was that prevented me from seeing it the first time. Often, my comments became “your argument could be X, or it could be Y. I thought it was X at first because you wrote A here, but then you wrote B there, which made me think it was Y. I think X is a stronger argument and better supports your thesis. So, if it’s indeed X, I’d suggest rewriting B in this way.” Very often, in the process of thinking through these action items, my original comment changes. I might have started with “the logic is unclear” or “I don’t think this follows”, but ended with something along the lines of “I think you’re using this term in a different way than you did two pages earlier” or “you should clearly mark that you’ve now changed topic”.
Another kind of action items I tried to do when commenting on student papers is suggesting writing practices that might help them address, e.g., the pervasive tendency to assume too much knowledge from the reader. It’s difficult to know whether the strategies I suggested are helpful at all, especially most of them involve “write a draft, put it away for a few days, then read it again”, which is how I solve everything. Regardless, I’d like to think that this way of framing feedback at least gives more of the impression that there are things they can do to change how they write, rather than that they wrote poorly and therefore are bad writers.
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Super interesting and helpful post! Thanks!
I also wanted to share something I found to be useful when giving comments for students (not peers). Since I’ve been grading lots of essays, I now divide the grade into three categories, structure, knowledge/understanding, and argument. I have some blurb somewhere what I mean by these things shared with the students. I assign a letter grade to each part. Then a summary of what I found to be confusing/room for improvement.
Generally, since doing this, students have not complained about grades AT All and in the evals, they said that they found the feedback to be constructive and actionable.
Much of the time, lack of clarity (for students generally, but myself too as a writer) is structural issue rather than a sentence level issue. And when this is explicitly communicated it really makes a difference how to handle comments on clarity! 🙂