126 11 Before You Submit
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
advice^2 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.