From First to Second Draft 127
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.