ABSTRACT
The feedback received during supervisory sessions can be critical to the successful completion of the dissertation. If supervisor commentary is timely, relevant, and articulate, it can allow students to see draft texts in a new light and to revise them. However, if feedback is vague, too critical, or focused on the wrong aspects of the text, students may find supervisory sessions more frustrating than useful. This chapter draws on interviews, focus group discussions, and recorded conversations between doctoral students and their supervisors in order to examine this vital educational relationship. The purpose of the chapter is eminently practical: to help doctoral students take advantage of what their supervisors tell them, even when the comments are obscure. The chapter offers interpretations of supervisors’ remarks about content, organisation, strategy, citations, tone, and other aspects of text so that doctoral students can more fully exploit feedback. Unfortunately, the research informing this chapter indicates that supervisor feedback
is often ambiguous, enigmatic, and coded – that is, saturated with meaning, but difficult to understand. The reason for this is clear: really useful advice to writers, the kind that professional editors and critics offer, comes from a deep understanding of how texts work, how they advance arguments effectively, and how they affect readers. Even supervisors who publish frequently may not be capable of conducting the sort of close textual analysis that leads to insightful feedback. Bazerman, a rhetoric scholar, explains:
I have found smart, accomplished colleagues in other disciplines who have little vocabulary for discussing writing beyond the corrective grammar they learned in high school. Although they have learned the genres of their profession and are successful in them, their reflective ability to manipulate them is limited because of a lack of linguistic and rhetorical vocabulary and analytical methods.
