4.29 Why you shouldn’t wait for a polished draft

One of the most annoying phrases I hear is “my supervisor only gives feedback on polished drafts”. This is usually accompanied by stories of wasting weeks stressing about whether the work is polished enough, only for the supervisor to later declare it “missing the point” or other such criticisms. In this episode I discuss (ok, I rant about) why waiting for a polished draft is a fundamentally flawed policy and what we should do instead. I give advice for supervisors who think that this is the easiest/best way (I know you’re not doing it to be unhelpful!) and for students whose supervisors still do this. Check it out if you’re in this position, or if you just want to hear me get a bit feisty! 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to edit your work without hating yourself. 

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now, I'm not gonna lie, I've been procrastinating recording this. I'd got a plan for what I was gonna do and for various reasons I wasn't able to do it this week, and I've not been in a great mood. I'm not sure why. Sun shining mostly. Not sure why the grumps have hit, but the grumps have hit a little bit.

And one of the things that I'm really working on is being able to still do the things I need to do, even when I don't particularly feel like it. And that is something that I do struggle with. And so yesterday I was meant to record this podcast. I didn't. But today it's like, right, I'm gonna record this podcast.

And so I thought, what would I say to my members if they had a task that they didn't really feel like doing, but that they wanted to get done? And I decided to try and practice what I preach. So what would we talk about? We would talk about why we want to do the thing, whether we're willing to do the thing, that we don't necessarily have to be motivated to do it. [00:01:00] We just have to be willing to do it. And one of the things we've been talking about more recently is using your strengths, meeting yourself where you are at and moving forward from there. So I thought, right, what would using my strengths and meeting myself where I'm at, look like, and I realized that the one thing that was is I have a lot of opinions and I'm feeling a little grumpy. So I thought, why not?

You're gonna get one of my opinions today. Uh, so let's go. This is partly aimed at supervisors. If you are a supervisor who does the thing I'm about to get grumpy about, then I'm gonna spend the next 20 minutes or so trying to convince you as to why you shouldn't. If your student who supervisor does the thing that I'm getting grumpy about, then I am going to help you build your logic when you ask for them to do it differently. And I'll give you some kind [00:02:00] of coping strategies if they refuse to change. So that's what we're gonna do today. I'm gonna channel my grumpy and have a little rant. Let's go.

So what's the thing? The thing, and it comes up in my membership. It comes up in my one-to-one coaching, and frankly, it comes up when I do supervisor training and people defend it. And that is not giving feedback until you have a polished draft. Whew. Deep breath, Vikki. This winds me up more than pretty much anything else in the supervisory world because I think it wastes everybody's time. I understand where it comes from and I will talk with you where I think it comes from, but it is such a time waster in practical ways, in emotional ways, and it's a time waster for both supervisor and student.

So first of all, where does it come from? Well, what I hear from a surprising number of [00:03:00] students is that their supervisors won't give feedback on any writing until it's polished. And by polished they mean sounding like it's actually a piece of academic writing. So it's in the correct sort of academic tone, whatever that means in your discipline that it doesn't have spelling errors and typos and grammatical mistakes and repetitive, you know, it's elegantly written and I get it. Supervisors, if you're listening, I know you are tight for time. I've been there. I massively get how tight of time you are and when we read something that we were expecting to be polished, that is then really scruffy. It's really easy to get cross about that because it's really easy to then think that you have to spend lots of time correcting it. So making it mean something about how much time and effort you need to put into it. It's really easy to make it mean [00:04:00] something about. That person's work, it's really easy to read it and be like, oh, this is so scruffy. They've clearly not put any effort in, and it's so, it's really easy to then end up making assumptions about the people who've submitted it to you or whether they're taking it seriously and whether they're capable and all these sorts of things. And so I understand the frustration of unexpectedly receiving a scruffy draft when you're expecting something else. I can then also kind of see the logic. It's like, okay, well if I then tell them to make sure that it's polished, then that won't happen. Okay. So it's one of those situations where there's a very valid problem, but we've jumped to the wrong solution because we think the solution is asking them to submit polished drafts.

But there are so many problems associated with waiting until students submit polish drafts. One of the things I teach in my [00:05:00] membership is that writing is actually made up of a whole series of different types of tasks. From writing just about the things you're reading, writing about the things that you are thinking, and none of that writing goes into your final writing. This is more kind of writing as processing and decision making.

There's outlining, there's rough drafts, there's macro editing where we are really thinking about the content, whether it covers everything, whether the proportions are about right, and all those sorts of things. Micro editing where we make sure that it accurate and that it's, you know, appropriate for our discipline and things like that. And then there's kind of a proofreading element and so on, and we don't move through those in a linear way. We move through them quite iteratively. But they're all different tasks, right? And the problem with asking for a piece of polished writing before you give feedback is that somebody is therefore moving between all of those steps without feedback at [00:06:00] any point until they get to the last bit, and then you give them feedback on that bit.

And then what happens is you are like, oh, I don't think you should include any of this stuff, but you should have included this stuff that you omitted. And suddenly they've polished paragraphs that you are now telling them to take out they've not written things entirely that you think should be included, and so all of a sudden you are giving them really demoralizing feedback because something that they've spent ages toiling over to make it sound good, is being removed entirely, and they've realized they've entirely missed other things.

Requesting polished drafts also completely shifts the focus of what you are asking for when you're getting feedback. Because if you tell somebody it has to be polished before it comes to me, you're saying it needs to be good. Okay. It needs to not only cover the stuff, I think it should [00:07:00] cover in the ways I think it should, but it should sound the way it should. It should be correct and accurate and proofed read and all those things. And so what the student's brain is then saying is, is it good enough? Is it good enough? Is it good enough? Is it polished enough? Okay. That's the question they're asking themselves. And the problem when a student is going, do I think it's good enough? Do I think it's do it good enough? Is that the vast majority of PhD students don't often think their work is good enough, or at least don't have a good, um, kind of yard stick to measure what good enough really is. What that really means. And so what then happens is we end up having huge amounts of time between rounds of feedback because they've got to do the entire drafting and outlining process.

And they've got to edit it and they've got to polish it and they've got to proofread it and they're probably then gonna procrastinate sending it to you 'cause they're worried it's not good enough. And so keep fiddling with the [00:08:00] text and keep checking things and moving things around a little bit and stuff until eventually they either panic enough that they submit it or they eventually think that it might just be good enough and they're not sure what else they'll do anyway and so they submit it. It means we take a huge amount of time in between setting the piece of work and getting anything to look at, and there's so many places that they can go wrong in that process. I did mention I was grumpy, didn't I? I told you this again, ranty. Anyway and so we waste so much time. We waste so much effort and we don't teach the principles of good feedback.

Now the usual pushback, and I've had this in supervisor training sessions that I've run, i've had this as a pushback. The usual pushback against looking at earlier drafts is I can't focus on the content if there are mistakes. And I have two responses to that. [00:09:00] The first one is if it's clear what the person is asking for feedback on, and we're gonna talk about that in a second, exactly what I mean. If it's clear what the person is asking for feedback about, you absolutely should be able to, because if the question is, is it good enough? It's hard to answer that when there's lots of mistakes.

But if the question is, does my broad argument make compelling sense, you can absolutely answer that, even if there's typos and mistakes in it. Okay. So that's my first one is if we are really clear what the feedback is about, why we're asking for feedback at this time point, then absolutely the mistakes don't make any difference in it, whether it's in elegantly written, whether there's typos and things doesn't make any difference.

The other is if it is just that typos annoy you and you feel the need to correct them, I am gonna say this with love 'cause I do have a lot of supervisors that listen to [00:10:00] this. That's a you problem. That is a you problem. You get to learn to regulate your own emotions about the fact that typos annoy you. Perhaps delve a little bit into why they bother you so much and what perfectionist standards you maybe need to work through so that you can look at something and give feedback without it being perfectly polished.

An analogy that often helps people see this is I want you to imagine you're a commissioned artist. Okay, so you're an artist who paints paintings that other people request. So it's not that you just make them and sell them to people, that people come to you and say, I want you to do a painting of my house, or a painting of my dog, or whatever.

And you then paint it to demand. Now the client could say, oh, I won't know if I love it until I see the finished picture. So do the whole thing all the way through. Do the composition, do the drafting, [00:11:00] do the choosing of the colors of the paint.

Do finalize the actual painting. Make it all beautiful. Varnish it, frame it. And then I'll tell you whether I like it or not. Ludicrous, no commissioned artist would ever do that. Okay. What would happen instead is that you would have discussions where you're like, I'm thinking about doing it like this. You might show a series of sketches that you've done go, do you like the dog laying like this, or do you want it sitting up ? Do you prefer this or that? I'm thinking of these sorts of paint swatches. What do you think? Are these the colors you enjoy? You do all of that stuff. It's the same for you to an interior designer. You wouldn't say, I want you to make a polished version. Do my whole house. And then I'll tell you whether I like it and whether you need to change it or not. No, they make mood boards. They do all the different, you know, they do the designs, they'd show examples you know, little bits of this is what a final bit might look like, but not all of it.[00:12:00] 

And we would absolutely expect that. And the reason we'd expect that is because if we give feedback regularly on specific things, then we are so much more likely to be working together in the same direction. And that's what we want, right? We want supervisor and students to feel like they're working together in the same direction with the same common aim.

So what we want is not to be waiting for polished drafts. We want to be able to have feedback that's appropriate for the stage at every stage of the feedback process. Does that mean that as a supervisor, you should be reading every scruffy draft that they produce? No, because a scruffy draft is not necessarily the best way of getting feedback on the specific thing that you need feedback on at any one time.

And so instead of thinking that our option is, oh, I either have to read lots of scruffy drafts, or I have to wait for polished drafts, and that will just be how it is. [00:13:00] We get to ask ourselves, what do I actually want to give feedback on at this stage, and what is the best way for them to present that to me such that I'm able to do it?

Okay. Really, really important question. So, if you think about it at the beginning of a writing process, what things do you wanna get feedback on? Then you wanna make sure that the broad argument is clear, that the research question is well established and justified that the scope of the data collection or whatever version you do in your discipline. Is about right. Does it matter whether everything's spelled correctly? Of course it doesn't. Absolutely doesn't, and it's not what we're gonna give feedback on, but we are gonna give feedback about are those broad things. This is the academic equivalent of a sketch. Are the main things in the right places. Does it look like this will build towards a compelling argument? Are they making it compellingly yet? [00:14:00] No. But does it look like the right pieces are there to build towards a compelling argument? And so then you ask, right, if that's what I need to do at the early stages of a draft, what's the best format for me to get that?

Is that a annotated bibliography? Is that a detailed outline so I can see what order they're planning to do it in? Is it, and this is something people very rarely use, but I'm a big fan of, is it a polished summary? So if you only want to read polished text, I would massively encourage you to get your students to write a polished summary. So like 500 words or 800 words or something like that, that tells the whole story in beautiful, elegant writing so that you don't have a meltdown when you see a typo, um, but polished. And then you can see does this actually make sense in this order? Are there sections we don't need? Are there sections that are missing?[00:15:00] 

Are there sections that are repetitive and that will take so much less time than doing a polished draft of 4,000 words or whatever. So ask yourself, what's the piece that they need in order to move forward? What specific thing do I need to get feedback on?

And what's the best format for us to do that? Sometimes it could be a presentation. Right. It could be. Talk me through the argument here. Talk me through how you are presenting this. It could be if you are in a sort of quantitative, numerically kind of a field, it could be, give me the research question, give me the principle graph and give me 10 lines of explanation of that graph, for example. What do I need in order to be able to actually give meaningful feedback for the stage that it's at.

If you're at a stage where actually their ability to write in an academic way, whatever that means in your [00:16:00] discipline and your opinion is your biggest concern. It doesn't have to be the full thing. Ask 'em to give you a paragraph. You can give decent feedback on academic writing and style from a paragraph. Why have they got to polish the whole thing? Ask them to submit a piece of writing, a short piece, paragraph, two paragraphs, something like that. Give them feedback on that specific feedback. Not completely rewording, but like specific feedback. And then ask them, I want you to write two more paragraphs and I want you to apply the feedback I gave you on these paragraphs to everything else.

Or even better get them to submit a couple of paragraphs of writing. Then you go through with them, actually sat next to them or on a screen together, go through and go, oh, I would move this to here. See how if we rephrase that, that would be clearer. See how you've got repetition here and here. Actually take them through, editing real life with them, and then say, I want you to take the [00:17:00] principles of what we've done to that paragraph and apply it to the rest of the work before you give it to me.

Because that's the other thing, right, is if you get them to polish an entire thing, if there's one problem with the way they write or one misunderstanding, it's gonna be infused through that whole thing, and you are either gonna have to correct it a hundred times, or you are not gonna give feedback on the whole thing, in which case it was pointless to them giving you the whole thing.

It is much better to pick up these issues or short pieces of text and then to give them the opportunity to go away and apply the feedback that you've taught them and to see whether it now comes back better next time. And the joy of this is if you are more specific in your feedback, if you are much clearer exactly which element we're giving feedback on right now, you can do it so much faster. 'cause some people are going, Vikki, I don't have time for many, many iterations of feedback. My view, you [00:18:00] don't have time not to have many iterations of feedback. Because if your student works for three months to send you something polished and then you realize there's fundamental flaws with it, you got another three months before, yes, you might have spent an hour, two hours reading it or whatever, but you've now got another three months to wait until they send you the next polished draft. We want to build to a stage where we can get to quick and dirty feedback. Where actually to give them the bit of information, the bit of opinion, the bit of insight that they need to move forward doesn't take you very long 'cause you're keeping it really specific.

So it's a, here's something quick. Okay, think about this, think about that. Okay, go away. Here's the next bit. Okay, let's go. So it keeps the ball moving. It makes it much less likely that you are getting off track makes it much more likely that overall the efficiency of it will work so much better.

And finally, what do you do if you're a student whose supervisor [00:19:00] insists on this and is unlikely to listen to my little podcast rants? Well, I think the first thing is to get really clear yourself on your purpose for asking feedback because if you can get clear on your purpose for asking for feedback at this stage, you can then get creative about what you could offer to share with them, to enable them to give feedback on that, that doesn't involve them reading a full scruffy draft. So we've talked about a bunch of options here. You could suggest those not saying, I don't want you to wait for a polished draft anymore, so please could you do it differently, but instead saying it will be useful if at this time, juncture, I could get feedback on this specific thing. Would it be okay if I talk it through with you or give you a polished summary or do a quick presentation or something, one of the ideas that I just gave you? You can actually suggest those as an alternative approach.

The second thing that you can do, and this doesn't always work, but I still think it's quite a useful practice, [00:20:00] is you can indicate where you know it's not as polished as it could be. Part of the thing that supervisors worry about is if they read something and it's not very good, is whether or not you think it's good. Because if it's not very good and you don't think it's good, then we're not too bad. We're just earlier in the stages. But if they don't think it's good and you do think it's good, then we've got more of a kind of taste gap going on. We've got a more of a lack of understanding happening. And so what you can do if you are encouraging them to look at something that is an earlier draft than they would normally want to, is indicate places that have not yet been proofread, or places where you know that it needs shortening, for example, okay? So that they can spend less time feeding back on the things that you already know.

The final thing is I would really encourage you to figure out a fast way to get it to polished enough, because what we're doing here is not getting it [00:21:00] to the stage where we think it is good enough and as good as we can possibly get it, we're getting it to a stage where it's polished enough that they won't be crossed about it.

So what might that look like? That might look like not spending ages and ages, really, sort of battling with yourself as to whether to say the sentence like this or like that. But instead simply going through it and making sure there's no errors in it, making sure that you've checked for spelling mistakes, you've checked for typos, things like that.

So it may not be your best piece of work ever, but you've done a quick sweep through to give it a sort of a veneer of polish, okay? So that it's not overtly messy. that way you can still ask for more specific types of feedback on particular issues that you're concerned about at the moment, but you've kind of scrubbed off the top those obvious mistakes that are gonna flag it as being not a polished version.

And the irony is [00:22:00] for many of you that might be just what your supervisor means. That your supervisor doesn't mean this has to be the absolute best that you could possibly achieve in three months, but they mean please just check there's not overt mistakes in it. And if that's the case clarifying that might straighten this whole thing out. Anyway, it may just be that you've got mixed messages as to what a polished draft even means to your supervisor, so hopefully there's some little workarounds for you if your supervisors aren't open to looking at rougher versions or different formats. 

So that's my little rant. And you might be going, but Vikki, no one would be asked for polished drafts. I always look at early drafts if, if that's you. I love you. You are great. Make sure you stay focused in what you're asking for so that you're not exhausting yourself, giving full feedback on every element at every stage. Because that's the other flip side is if you are one of these lovely [00:23:00] supervisors who says, show me it whenever you are ready but doesn't say what to show you and doesn't say specifically what you're looking at, then you are simultaneously feeding back on clarity and compellingness. And, detail and accuracy and spelling, style, punctuation, grammar.

If you are feeding back on all of those, every time you are doing too much work, you are at the other end of my problems here. Okay? I love you dearly and you don't have time to do that. You are not serving your students by trying to do that. So if you are at the other end, you're like, oh, but I always read it, then we need to think much more clearly about how can you ask them to give you something that allows you to assess the one thing that you're assessing in this round of feedback and get it back to them rapido so they can get on and do the next thing. And you can get on and do the rest of everything else.

If you are also thinking, but I don't know anyone who'd asked for polished drafts. You'd be [00:24:00] surprised. Unfortunately, you would be surprised. Every group of students I've ever worked with, at least some of them have supervisors who say they will only read polished drafts, and that's why it winds me up quite this much. And that's why this felt like a fun topic to talk about in a week where I was feeling a little bit grumpy anyway, and I actually felt better for talking about it. I hope it is useful.

I am actually, and I just decided this spontaneously, so I'll like make it work. I am going to create a little landing page where you can come and get a feedback request form proforma that I have designed and recommend using. It enables students to be much more specific about what they're asking for from you.

Students, even if your supervisors don't ask for it, you could use it as a kind of template for an email or something like that just to really clarify your thoughts about what you're asking for. Supervisors, I'd really encourage you to use it with your students. I'll create a little landing page. I'll put it [00:25:00] in the show notes. So whenever you go to my website, PhD life coach.com, if you click on podcast, you'll be able to see all of the show notes from all the different episodes, and I will make sure that there's a link in there where you can download, this particular PDF and I hope you find it useful.

Thank you so much. I hope I wasn't too ranty, but I kind of enjoyed it. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next week.