2026-08-01 06:14 UTC
Replies (6)
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@tanyakaroli@expressional.social 2026-08-01 06:37
@SeaFury@aus.social I agree, that is a totally unhelpful comment. I always try to either explain to my students why they need to rephrase something (maybe their sentence focuses something that they don’t follow up on, or it is too convoluted to extract the right point from, or too long, or …). But I have also been an editor of a linguistics journal for years, so that is part of my expertise. If that paragraph isn’t too technical, I’d be happy to give it a look and see if I can understand why your supervisor might have wanted it rephrased. Also, remember that you are free to disregard this piece of advice from your supervisor. Not all types of feedback are useful.
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@artdragon86@mastodon.art 2026-08-01 06:25
@SeaFury@aus.social My supervisors were good in general (ie. in terms of responding and providing feedback in a timely manner) but one also gave this sort of feedback, so vague it was practically useless. Sometimes she'd literally just put a question mark at the end of a paragraph and it was like "What the fuck does this MEAN?" Half the time I had to hunt her down and ask her in person but that wasted time I could have spent actually writing if I'd been given actionable feedback.
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@alunprice@aus.social 2026-08-01 06:46
@SeaFury@aus.social If you can afford it hire professional thesis editor. I did, but I think the uni payed for some of it. Long time ago so can't remember the details. I found having a third person reader was valuable.
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@aarblaster@mastodonapp.uk 2026-08-01 08:33
@SeaFury@aus.social gaaaaa that’s so frustrating.
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@huxley@mstdn.social 2026-08-01 08:53
@SeaFury@aus.social I think if you don't know why they put that comment then it would be fair to ask them. Does it need rephrasing because it is unclear, or because it is inelegant? I was lucky to have an excellent supervisor, who I have been thinking about because he died recently. The most important things in academic writing are precision and clarity. A thesis is just a series of factual statements backed up by evidence or logic, so every statement must have an empirical or logical basis.
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@annasdtc@sciences.social 2026-08-01 21:34
@SeaFury@aus.social I am supervising my first PhD student and I am quite happy when they email me mid week "sorry I am not sure what you meant" rather than wait until next meeting. Our training is in research, and we learn teaching, mentoring and other academic tasks as we go. Also, advice: do not write for your supervisor or for yourself, but for a distracted reader with the attention span of a toddler because they're working on too many things at once (the average academic, including journal reviewers).