8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
episode 8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
So, you got up your nerve and asked for feedback on your work...now what?? It can be so hard to process someone else's thoughts on how, where, when, and why your work should change, and balance their suggestions with your own vision. This episode has strategies to help you move through that a little more efficiently, a little more gently, and hopefully with just a dash more empowerment.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
The biggest and only sale of the year is happening at thrive-phd.com. Check the link in the show notes for more information.
If asking for feedback is one of the more vulnerable things that you can do as a grad student, receiving and processing and moving your work forward based on that feedback? Well, that's even harder. So this week, let's talk about some strategies, some experiments to try some places to reflect around what your process is for taking other people's ideas on how you should do your work and incorporating them into your own scholarship.
One of the things that's so hard about processing feedback is that most of us push toward some sort of submission. We use that to monitor our energy. We say, okay, I'm going to get this chapter ready to send to my advisor by the end of the month. You push you get that chapter ready.
And then you're it feels done. You feel like you can take a break and switch to other projects, but then the feedback comes back and then you are very much undone. You have things to address and it can really sort of make you feel like you're going backwards. Processing feedback can be really uncomfortable because what you thought was up to a certain point is not at that point anymore through no fault of your own.
And a lot of the changes in that feedback can be more substantial than you're used to. I know that when I started grad school, I was really only used to copy editing my paper, checking things over for spelling mistakes, maybe a grammar mistake here or there. I'd never actually changed much of anything that was more substantial than that. I definitely hadn't done any major restructurings.
I hadn't paid attention to citations. I hadn't thought about my voice really in any substantial way. So the kind of feedback that I was used to was much more quickly addressed than the kind of feedback that I was now working with. And that made me feel like I just wasn't a good writer which may into processing that feedback even harder.
One of the things that's really hard for scholars in grad school and even further along in the field is that the feedback are based on what other people think that you should do with your work. And it can be really difficult to balance what you envisioned for the project, the directions you want to take it in, the way you want to write it, the way you want to research it, with all of the people who have more or less power depending on the situation to make you do it their way. Some suggestions are really great and you're excited because they move the project forward into a way that you couldn't have imagined and it feels even better than what you could have pictured. And then some things really don't feel like they're in line with the kind of work, the kind of scholarship you want to do.
So processing feedback can be this very tricky dance where you're trying to balance your own voice and vision for the project with the feedback from people who have the power to get your dissertation passed or get that article published or give you a book contract. It's certainly not as straightforward as checking for any typos.
This is a sensitive topic. So put your feet on the floor, take a deep breath and think about these questions. You might want to get a journal. You might want to go for a walk and think about them, but let's dive into what feels salient about the way that you already interact with feedback.
Question one. If you were to write out the steps of how you process feedback - so you get a draft back it's covered in feedback - what would you do? What are the steps?
What is the order? Sometimes we don't have a good understanding of our own system, or we've never really done that before. So it can be hard to imagine a different way.
Question two. What role does feedback play in your professional ecosystem? Is it given regularly and constructively? Infrequently or less than generously? What are the constraints that you're working with? Does your advisor take forever to get feedback back to you? And then you're really in a rush to integrate it? Do they want to see a draft every single week? And then every single week you have things to change and you feel like you're revising the same 10 pages over and over again? What are the constraints that you maybe feel like you can't change? You might not be able to reach into your advisor's brain and make them better at feedback. And what are the things that you could imagine working differently?
And then lastly, how does feedback work with your brain and emotional landscape? Are you working with rejection sensitivity? Or do you seek out a lot of extra feedback for validation that you're on the right track? So often our human stuff comes out to play during activities that feel tied to our worth and performance and feedback on your writing is nothing but one of the most intense versions of that kind of experience. So it's worth looking at what your overall relationship is to things like feedback or criticism or suggestions that you could or need to change.
But let's get into some of the experiments that you can try now that you've received some feedback.
The first one I'm calling, working big to small. I know that the first couple of times I got substantial feedback on a piece of writing. I opened it up and I started to address the comments from the top of the draft to the bottom. Unfortunately, this often meant that I changed the introduction of a chapter or an article so substantially that I almost lost track of what the chapter was supposed to do, what things I was changing. And it got really frustrating and confusing in the middle, trying to change things at all of these different levels at once.
So I really recommend that you work through all the feedback and decide what are the really big changes that you need to make on down to the smaller ones. So if there is a suggestion that you might want to restructure things, it's better to do that big restructuring and then work with all of your transition sentences. Otherwise you're going to be polishing transition sentences for transitions that no longer exist.
You get the drift, but this can be counter, intuitive. Especially, if you are used to a more copy editing style of feedback, where you kind of go through and you address the typos, you address the changes one by one. If your doing something that's much closer to revision, which almost all of us are that strategy can really backfire. So work from big to small and see what happens with your overall sense of flow and understanding of that piece as it changes.
Experiment two is categorizing and sorting feedback into three different categories. I love a three column list. If you hang out on this podcast long enough, I'm sure I will suggest. Uh, other three column lists that you can do. But this one is one of my favorites. Especially if you're processing feedback from someone who gives you a lot of feedback, they write down every thought, or this can be really helpful if you're revising a substantial amount of writing, more than three or four pages.
You make a list of all the things that you're going to change or that are suggested that you can change. And you sort those items one by one into three different categories. The first category are the things that you're definitely going to fix. They're good suggestions. You think they need it? They make the piece stronger. Automatic Yes From you. Those all go in column one.
Column two are the things that you might do, but you're not really sure. They could be a good idea, but it may be depends on a restructuring or if you've changed some of the literature. There are things that you want to come back to later. You haven't ruled them in or ruled them out yet. And you've maybe guessed it, but column three are the things that you absolutely will not do.
I really like to empower grad students to make this third column, because many of us feel like we can't. Then, if our advisor says that we have to change something, then you have to change it no matter what. And to be clear, some advisers do expect you to implement every single one of their changes and that's a different situation.
But if you're getting feedback from somebody, maybe from a writing group member or a committee member that doesn't know the whole project or somebody that's dropping in and giving feedback without all of the context, then there can be a list that you make that's called, "these are great ideas, but not for me."
And then once you have your three columns, that's the order in which you do the revisions. You start with this stuff that you're definitely going to do. And then you move things in that middle column into, yes. This is a good suggestion in this new world. I'm going to work with that or, no, I don't think this one applies anymore.
I also love this strategy because it can help you get out of the mindset that every suggestion is one that you need to take. This way you have a list of the suggestions that you considered and the reasons why, whether you wrote them down or not, you decided not to use them which can help you feel really empowered as a writer that you don't need to do every single thing that every person on earth suggests because it's your project.
Experiment three is for all of my people out there who feel a lot of sensitivity and vulnerability around feedback. I count myself among you, by the way. One strategy that can be really effective that I suggest that you experiment with is having a friend, a colleague, this can even be a non-academic person read through the feedback and summarize it for you. So if you have a draft that's covered in red ink and you just can't bear to look at it and you have a friend in your corner.
Sometimes it can be really helpful to send it to them and say, Hey, can you summarize like the top five most important things that this person thinks I should change? And then you work off of a clean copy of your writing to make those revisions.
If you get the kind of archetypal. Reviewer two who just sort of slashes through your work in a way that's not helpful or constructive at all. This can be a really excellent way to kind of soften some of the blow of that. Have it be translated into more actionable language by a person that cares about you and cares about the work.
And then you work from the translation and not the unfiltered, deeply ungenerous reality. Or the unfiltered completely overwhelming reality. There is no rule that says that once somebody gives you feedback, that becomes the most important copy of your work.
Sit down with that list of things that you could do, the list of things that your friend has sort of summarized for you. And work from that version as opposed to the one that's covered in some useful, but a lot of not useful feedback. Whether that's overwhelming ungenerous or both.
I really want to encourage softness with this particular week of experiments and overall with the process of processing feedback. It can be really difficult on our nervous systems on our heart and even on our kind of scholarly identity to feel like somebody thinks that this piece needs to actively change, but....
I'm here to tell you from the other side of that particular moat, that all academic writers revise their writing heavily. Many of us are moving through multiple rounds of feedback, multiple rounds of revision, different editors, different reviewers revises, and resubmits committee feedback. Start from the drawing board. That's all part of the kind of very complex writing that academic work generally tends to be.
So if you're finding it difficult, you are 100% not alone. And I hope that some of these strategies help make it feel a little bit more doable and less overwhelming. See you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
episode 7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work? And why is it sometimes even harder to get the kind of feedback we WANT on your work, when and how you want it? This episode is all about one of the biggest (and hardest) skill jumps a grad student has to make - going from seeing feedback as a grade, to seeing it as a tool to develop work.
A few resources on reading and evaluating writing, in case they're useful!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
There's still time to join us in AcWriMo. And there'll be more details about that at the end of this podcast.
When I started to plan for this podcast, I knew I had to have an episode about asking for feedback, because this is one of the hardest things that grad students do. And it's also one of the most mysterious things. We have a sort of narrative that people get feedback on their writing, but who really knows how much, what kind, at what frequency, from what people...
All of those questions are really idiosyncratic. They vary wildly from discipline to discipline from sometimes even supervisor to supervisor. So let's zoom out a little bit and think about why the process for asking for feedback can be so difficult. And what things you might want to do about it.
The first reason that asking for feedback is really hard is because we're not often used to feedback as development. We're used to feedback as evaluation. If I were to ask many young grad students in the beginning of their programs what feedback means to them - most of them, I have to bet would say, "oh, it's the comments at the end of the paper. It's the work that I get on my exams when I turn it in so that I can do better for next time."
Which is a model of feedback where your work is judged against a standard. And the feedback is meant to show you where you fallen short in some ways or what things you've done well so that you can take that knowledge into a new class, into a new project.
But often as a grad student, you're working on a complex project with many parts over the course of years often, and the feedback is meant to help you develop the project instead of evaluate it. The feedback helps you pick a better research question or narrow down the variables for your experiment. But if you're used to that feedback coming as a, "did I do a good enough job on this? Yes or no?" kind of frame, it can be really difficult to get that feedback. And ask for it because it feels like asking to be graded on purpose.
Another thing that can be really difficult about asking for feedback is that you might not know what's possible until you hear the range of feedback that's being offered to other grad students in your department, in your university, around the world. I sometimes hear from clients that they have one single source of feedback: that they can only share drafts in progress with a PI, or with a chair of a committee. And then I know other people who live in a department culture where the entire committee gathers to discuss a chapter in progress and you get a rich, robust, beautiful conversation with five or six or even seven people. Sometimes some departments have a culture of helping develop work in pro seminars or in colloquiums or in workshops for feedback. But other people really only work with one person. And if that one person isn't giving you the feedback that you want or need, it can be hard to imagine a world beyond what you've been given. Or to feel like you can ask for something different if it's not being offered to you.
And lastly let's be real, not all mentors or supervisors or the people giving you feedback are skilled at giving feedback. So one or more bad experiences - feedback that's not helpful, feedback that's really harsh - can really turn you off to the idea of like, yes, I volunteer as tribute for more of this criticism, please. And because we don't often train supervisors. Into the very difficult role of how do you see somebody else's work? How do you not push them exactly into the way that you would do it? And develop what's strong about what's already there - that's a high level skill that a lot of people aren't getting training in. So it both makes sense that people aren't great at it off the jump. And it also makes sense that lots of people are a little bit hesitant to ask for more.
So get your notebooks out, take a deep breath, and let's think about some questions that might help you figure out where your own stickiness is when it comes to asking for feedback.
What are the hardest parts of your writing process? Where do you tend to get stuck the most? Is it in the idea generation phase? Is it in the site citing other pieces of literature phase? Is it in the revision or the argumentation stages? But where do you tend to get stuck the most? Or what are the parts that you find to be the hardest?
What feedback experiences - for good or for bad - have stuck with you? How was that feedback given? How much time or space or support were you given in processing it? What is the model of feedback that you're applying to every one of these interactions moving forward as either the gold standard? Or the very much not gold standard?
And lastly, if you're a teacher. What kind of feedback do you offer your students? What do you notice about the process of giving feedback of grading, of evaluating of helping to develop works in progress that you can maybe use to think about what feedback is being offered to you? Because let's be real. You are also still a student.
Now some experiments to try, because I'm not just going to say, "wow, all of this is hard. Good luck out there, kiddos." The first one is getting specific about the kind of feedback that you're actually requesting. It's not nine times out of 10, but maybe five or six times out of 10. I see that people are able to get more of the feedback that they want by being able to more accurately name what they're looking for. So maybe imagine a rubric for graduate student writing. And if that's something that's hard for you to imagine, I've put some resources in the show notes for you. But think about what kinds of feedback we evaluate writing on? Is it structure, is it flow? Is it argument? Is it cohesiveness? Is it comprehensiveness?
And then I think about what level of feedback are you looking for? And how much time do you have to implement it? The kind of feedback that I'm looking for on a Friday when the chapter is due on Monday is very different than the kind of feedback that I want when I have maybe a few weeks or a couple of months to develop this paper or this chapter. And I'm actually looking for feedback about which ideas seems most promising. As opposed to what are two or three things that I can do today before the end of the day before I send this chapter off. So think about what kind of levels you're looking at, maybe what kind of levels of feedback you're lacking so that you can be more specific with the request that you ask for, whether that's with your supervisor.
Or. With the people that you identify in experiment two. Which is something that I'm calling, creating a feedback Rolodex. If you've never seen one before. Rolodex is an old fashioned way to keep track of people's phone numbers. It was a sat on desks. You maybe you've seen them in a variety of period television shows, but basically you would flip through it and it would help jog your memory of all of the people in your network. So this idea is for you to create a team, so to speak a feedback team.
And just like in any team, you're going to say, who is good at what? Maybe you have a friend who's an amazing copy editor. They're going to be a great person to help you proof a manuscript right before it needs to go to a journal.
Maybe you have a friend from a couple seminars ago that really loved the same things that you did, that are now the foundational texts of your work. And so you think about what they might help you with in terms of idea development or understanding of the literature or citing some of these authors.
You make this list and you say, okay, who are these people?
What are their superpowers? Who are these people on your feedback team? Who can you barter with? Maybe you set up a draft exchange with that really good friend who's great at using the same literature is you and you both agree to read drafts whenever the other person needs to, because that kind of foundational idea generation isn't really happening with your supervisors.
I really recommend that grad students create this team, not just of faculty members of mentors, but also their colleagues. Some of the best feedback that I got was from people who were underneath me in the program, because they were working in coursework with all of the foundational texts that I was drawing on. So it felt really fresh to them. So be creative and create that Rolodex so that you feel like your ability to get feedback doesn't hinge on just one person or just one specific group of people. And you have more places to go.
And our last experiment is to practice giving feedback yourself. I mentioned before that I think that a thriving economy of grad students supporting grad students is something really helpful. I think it's helpful to help people see that they're not alone. Writing groups for example, are really good for this.
Like writing, feedback is a skill. And the more you practice it, the better you get at delivering it. So you become a more valuable member of other people's feedback teams. Always something that's helpful to offer your scholarly community, but you also can be more adept at figuring out what kinds of feedback you're actually looking for.
The more you think about the process of giving feedback, the easier it becomes to specifically request the kinds and types and frequency of feedback that you're actually looking for. And if you don't have a scholarly community and let's be real pandemics have made a lot of that, a lot more challenging.
You can also think about your feedback process as you're grading, if you're in a process or a position where you teach people. I learned so much about what I was looking for in terms of feedback, by giving feedback to my students. It really helped me see, "oh, wow. It is really overwhelming if somebody gives you every thought in their head while they read a draft."
It is really frustrating if I tell my students two days before the deadline that, "oh yeah, this outline's not really going to work" . So giving more. Feedback, both as a reader and receiving it as a writer helps the whole ecosystem go round.
I am in no way here to undercut how sensitive it can be to put your work on the line and ask for people to look at it and tell you what's good about it and what things could be improved. But I think that it's one of the biggest skill jumps that grad students make - is this idea that when we ask other people for feedback, it's not because we want them to grade us.
It's because we want them to help us develop the work and that if you need help, developping a complex idea, then that's not a failure, that is making scholarship happen in a community. We all make scholarship happen in a community, whether that's asynchronously through sharing work, reading other people's writing, or in person or slightly more real time exchanging drafts.
Nobody does this alone. And the more that you can build a system of supportive feedback for yourself, the easier it is to see how and where other people are developing this work too. Until next time!
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!