Post #4306273
2026-08-01 06:14 UTC
PhD supervisors, please be more specific when you make comments. "Rephrase" is not acceptable. 1. I sent my writing in for review, it is the best I could do and I think it's pretty good already, so do you want me to make it worse? 2. What do you mean: do you want me to add something, remove something? Address something? I am feeling really frustrated at this point - I have been stuck on this section for about two weeks and it is putting my finishing date in danger. I have spent days trying to work out what he means.... #PhDLife
Replies (1)
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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.