Feedback is hard

Getting used to receiving feedback on your work, and especially the type of feedback you will get on your PhD, takes time, practice, and saintly patience.

There are many types of feedback - feedback from your trusted inner circle of friends; feedback from experts in your subject who are professional colleagues but not friends; feedback from a generalised audience (conferences, but also departmental writing groups); and feedback from the dreaded anonymous reviewers on publications. Most importantly as a PhD student, you will get ample feedback from your supervisor. 

Each of these different types of feedback should be engaged in because they will help you advance your writing in different ways. They must however be read through the lens of ‘it’s just feedback’. Not the word of God almighty. You are the one writing the PhD after all and will eventually become the expert. As you go through your PhD, the subject matter expertise will shift from your supervisor to you. This is as it should be. They will still have the expertise on the right level of writing for a PhD.

Genuine and useful feedback may reject our work, our ideas and be full of robust criticism. This may be hard to face, but it can, with a cool temper, be useful in improving our ideas, or at the very least, improving the delivery and clarity of our ideas. That is after all the purpose of the peer review system. It is better to face feedback on your work quickly, but then leave some time to ‘cool off’ before you look at it a second time to take notes from the useful parts (it won’t all be useful). Hopefully this cooling off period of about a week (no more, don’t procrastinate ) will help take the sting out of it.

You need to identify where your supervisor could have a valid point, and where you don’t understand the feedback, ask for clarification. That feedback will sound clear inside your supervisor’s head, but may not have made the transition to writing. We are all guilty of this. Their written feedback should be clear, typed onto your chapter submission and detailed. Depending on where you are on your PhD, you may have genuine pedagogical differences of opinion with your supervisor, but it is important to talk these out in a meeting and hear and understand where that supervisor is coming from. They are trying to get you through the PhD. See their feedback only through this lens. They are not trying to hurt your feelings, or undermine you. Sometimes we need to hear things we don’t want to.

A supervisor must (a) get you to the right standard of work (b) ensure you hit your milestones (c) ensure you have articulated your original contribution to knowledge. Everything they tell you should be viewed through that lens.

Add the important and relevant points in your feedback to your task list and get to them in due course. This also takes the sting out of them. You have adopted them as your own viewpoint, and put them into your non-threatening list. 

One further note: If your feedback consistently refers to your writing style, or a lack of critical analysis, I have developed stand-alone detailed modules to tackle these two very important aspects of writing the thesis. These are available in the Shop.

TODAY I WILL…

• Add any feedback to my task list as and when I receive it;

• Write for 2 hours minimum according to my schedule working my way down my list.