Receiving and giving feedback is a central aspect of academia, and we all need to develop strategies to deal with this aspect of the PhD experience. With a view to understanding the world of feedback and reviews as its own distinct corner of our research culture, resident blogger Ebba shares her advice for how to behave in situations involving feedback and what concrete things researchers can do to gain familiarity with the world of feedback and reviews.

There are several great posts on this blog about feedback, including how to find confidence in the face of harsh comments; small techniques to ease your emotional response to feedback; and how to deal with your supervisors, your main sources of feedback during the PhD. I’m sharing my own thinking this week with an emphasis on understanding feedback as its own ‘culture’ or ‘style’ of writing/communicating.

Direct your feedback

If the feedbacker is someone you’ll build a relationship with over time (like a supervisor), it can be helpful to communicate to them what kind of feedback you’re looking for. Unless there is dialogue about what their comments will deal with, you might end up feeling as though the feedbacker is answering the question: ‘Is the text good?’ This is especially unhelpful when you’re in the middle of a process and nowhere near done with the text. As part of your writing process, you might have specific questions about the way that your argument comes together, or whether the reader has the same understanding as you of what you’re saying.

While some feedbackers might feel pushed into a corner if they receive instructions along with a text, I think it’s worth trying to approach the feedback process as a dialogue, especially towards the end of the PhD. At this point, it shouldn’t all be about an almighty supervisor laying down the law that the researcher must follow. You had a particular ambition for what you wanted to achieve with your text, and it’s fine to acknowledge that.

Get experience giving feedback to others

Become a teaching assistant; get involved in a graduate journal as a peer reviewer or editor; initiate an informal reading group that comments on chosen texts together; or offer to write a book review for an academic journal. These are examples of different ‘genres’ of feedback, but they’re all ways of putting yourself in a position of looking critically at someone else’s work rather than others looking at yours.

This way, you’ll get a different perspective on what feedback is. You’ll notice that reading and commenting on someone else’s text comes with many challenges, and that there is probably good reason why feedbackers usually don’t dwell on the aspects of a text that’s already working – who’s got the time to do that?

There’s a ‘shorthand’ language that a lot of feedbackers, editors, and reviewers use that I found hurtful at first, but that I’ve learnt is just a standard way of expressing an idea: ‘awkward phrasing’, a comment I remember really threw me as an undergraduate, is usually shorthand for a variety of issues within a sentence that the feedbacker can’t, or don’t want to, take the time to resolve themselves.

The more feedback you give others, the more it will sink in for you that feedbackers usually want to be economical with their own time more than they want to dwell on the mistakes of others.

Find an additional reader

Reach out to other PhD students in your discipline and ask to exchange texts with them. If not that, then any friend or family member will do. My greatest experience ever with a text was during my master’s degree, when I had two different students from my course and three of my friends from home read my work, in addition to the two markers. I’d never felt so confident that what I had written made sense, and this made it easier to accept and work on feedback from markers.

Think about how you carry yourself

Feedbackers can feel worried that their comments won’t be well received. If you’re in a position to communicate with them personally, make sure to thank them for the time they’ve spent helping you. If you have the urge to defend yourself, and feel that the feedbacker didn’t take the time to read your work properly, resist the instinct to communicate this. Most feedbackers are aware that you can choose to discard their feedback if you don’t agree, and they expect you to mull over in your own time what you’re willing to take on board. I tell myself that if the reader didn’t understand what my text was saying, I need to change the way I wrote it, not the feedbacker’s mind.

Do what you need to find perspective

We all have different ways of taking ourselves out of that intense bubble of self-criticism that encapsulates us when we receive feedback that feels overwhelming. Personally, I’ve always taken comfort in identifying with fictional characters that make mistakes without being defined by them. Sound of Music‘s ‘Maria’, for instance, does a good job of painting a portrait of a character with plenty of flaws but who never stops being worthwhile and lovable; while a ‘flibbertigibbet’, a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ and a ‘clown’, Maria makes people laugh. When I start to take my mishaps too seriously, I listen to that song and wonder if I’m perhaps a whimsical heroine who’ve embarked on a challenging and slightly random adventure, with a chorus of nuns (reviewer 2’s?) complaining about me in the background.