♻️ 11. Feedback and Recursive Revision

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 11: Feedback and Recursive Revision, which should be completed between 4/6 - 4/11. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 10, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Practice reading feedback rhetorically
• Refine literature review
• Develop strategies for conducting qualitative interviews

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

Entering Unit 3 and Starting Primary Research

🛑 Stop: Read!

Reread the full guidelines for the Qualitative Research Project, then reread the Unit 3 guidelines. Remember, each unit should respond specifically to the unit guidelines and generally to the full assignment guidelines.

🛑 Stop: Watch!

As you work on your literature review, you might find the Yale Poorvu Center’s Academic Integrity 2: Summary and Paraphrase useful for thinking about how to paraphrase a source’s language without plagiarizing it.

As before, your writing tasks will overlap: as you revise your Literature Review for Draft 4, i.e. the second draft of Unit 2 (plus any ongoing revisions to the Research Introduction), you’ll also start working on Draft 5, i.e. the first draft on Unit 3. This module introduces Unit 3 by asking you to take what you started thinking about in Module 6 and start using it to begin the process of primary research.

Your primary research will ideally consist of 3 interview subjects that you interview in a synchronous F2F or audiovisual modality. Under extenuating circumstances, interviewing your subjects over direct messages and/or emails is acceptable but must be conducted synchronously or over several back-and-forth exchanges to allow for probe questions.

Important!

At least 1 of your primary sources must be someone you interview yourself!

Make sure to consider email etiquette when contacting potential interviewees:

• Be respectful and formal in your language
• Introduce yourself and your purpose in writing
• Explain, briefly, your research study, what it’s for, and what you hope to better understand from this project
• Acknowledge that their time is valuable and ask them (politely!) if they aren’t able to participate, if they can recommend anyone else for it

Here’s an example email:

Fill-in-the-Blanks!

Review the template email below and modify it by filling in the blanks with information relevant to your research project and your research hypotheses.

Dear NAME,

My name is _____ and I am an undergraduate student majoring in ______ at Pace University. I am writing to ask if I could interview you for a research study for my ENG 201 class on qualitative research and critical writing. The purpose of my research is to better understand how ____________.

My research is about ____________. My study consists of an interview conducted in person, over the phone, or via video conferencing for a minimum of 15 minutes. If you can’t meet for this interview, please let me know and we can try to coordinate another modality.

This research is for a class assignment and will not be published. If you are unable to participate, I would appreciate it if you could let me know of anyone who might be interested in participating, and who has knowledge or experience of the area of my research.

Thank you for your time and assistance! If you have any questions, please reach out.

Sincerely, NAME

It’s possible that someone you want to interview won’t have time to participate. In case a potential interviewee can’t do it, make a shortlist of 6 people, and contact 3 at a time. That way, if someone refuses, you can contact the next person on your list.

Revising Interview Questions

🛑 Stop! Read:

Please be aware that if you have not implemented feedback from the General Feedback page and my comments in #classroom and #team, stop everything and do that now. Your interview questions must be clear, specific, and explicitly emerge from your research hypotheses, so if your hypotheses aren’t specific enough, your interview questions — and results — might end up being unusable.

Your interviewees should be knowledgeable about your field of study and have experience with the research questions you have to some degree. However, this is just a class project, not a publishable paper; you don’t need perfect interview candidates to demonstrate that you’re doing primary research and employing the skills you’re acquiring in this class.

You aren’t expected to obtain interviewees who are well-established members of the field, who don’t know you, and are likely too busy for an interview for an unpublished college essay; coworkers, relatives, family friends, friends, professors, and/or fellow students work just as well for this assignment.

🛑 Stop! Read:

Harvard University’s Strategies for Qualitative Interviews offers some tips for framing your questions and conducting the interviews themselves.

An effective interview starts with a few (maybe 5-8) open-ended clear and unbiased questions that allow respondents to explore your topic in depth. Asking “how” or “why” questions almost always allow for this kind of exploration. “What” questions are trickier, but if they invite answers that are longer than one word or phrase, they can work well, too. Cluster questions around similar topics so your participants’ responses more easily flow from one to the next. A semi-structured interview approach might be preferred, where you have a few structured (scripted) questions and looser topics that permit follow-up or clarification questions after a respondent answers.

🛑 Revise: Your Interview Questions!

Knowing everything you know now about the qualitative research project and your research focuses, draft, revise, or rewrite 5 potential interview questions and post them to your #team channel.

If you’re unable to find 3 interview subjects, then you can substitute a video recording of an invited lecture or conference talk (preferred) or a vlog by prominent members of your discipline where they discuss an aspect of your research focus. As with secondary research, you’ll need to evaluate the viability of potential video sources using CRAAP and IF I APPLY.

How to Conduct Interviews

🛑 Stop! Watch:

Dronkers’ TEDxHumboldtBay talk How to Interview “Almost” Anyone.

For more detailed insights, watch the following two videos, which work together as a pair to illustrate what works and what doesn’t work in qualitative interviewing:

🛑Stop! Watch:

Check out these two videos: Demo Qualitative Interview with Mistakes and Demonstration Qualitative Interview - How It Should Be Done, both done by Joanna Chrzanowska with I-TECH.

Redefining Revision

You’ve probably been taught that revision means changing words, fixing punctuation, and making other grammatical and mechanical edits, but this is just one of three tiers:

• Global revision: Ideas (like your research hypotheses), your approach, selected sources, organization, audience(s) being addressed
• Local revision: Sentence fluency, sentence pacing, word choice
• Proofreading: Grammar, mechanics, formatting

Important!

Your higher-order concerns (HOCs), i.e. top-level concerns, are global revision issues. Local revision and proofreading are lower-order concerns (LOCs), i.e. the very last thing you’ll do this semester.

Remember, if your research hypotheses, sources, approach, or structure need revision, then grammar and mechanics don’t matter — you’re just going to end up rewriting that sentence anyway.

It’s also important to remember that the spirit of inquiry is the heart of the academic enterprise. Abrams (2022) reminds us that “revision isn’t just about polishing — it’s about seeing your piece from a new angle, with ‘fresh eyes.’” It’s easy to get so close to a draft we’ve recently written that we lose sight of how to improve it. It might even feel like we’ve done everything there is to do for the draft. We have to learn to see our own work from a different perspective to improve it.

Don’t Worry If Your Peers Are Late!

You aren’t responsible for reading any papers that weren’t posted to #team by Sunday, but if you post your draft late, you’re still responsible for reviewing the other essays by Friday. Missing peer review does count as missed work, and impacts your final course grade, so make sure to complete peer review by the deadline. I note when students post drafts and who actively participates in peer review and who doesn’t.

Process Reflection

When you post your draft to #team, you’ll post a brief process reflection (~200-300 words) along with it. In this reflection post, you’ll explain your process of working on this draft by answering some or all of the following:

• What were your thought processes in developing your ideas and doing your research?
• What do you wish you’d had more time to work on?
• What do you want to do between this draft and the next, regarding both what you want to do personally and what the assignment guidelines ask you to do?

Be Honest!

Don’t just tell me what you think I want to hear! Your task isn’t to try to please me or impress me, but to help me help you refine your process of writing this project as well as refine your intentions for yourself as a developing writer. The more honest you are in your process reflections, the easier your revision decisions will get over time!

You can identify the assignment parameters you think you met and why, referencing the modules and instructions as evidence, and which you think you need to keep striving towards. If you want to, you can also note any regrets or difficulties you faced, any burdens or college or life that crept into your work, your attitude towards the assignment, and so on.

Workshop Instructions

This week, you’ll asynchronously workshop each other’s drafts in your #team channel. In addition to the suggestions from Straub’s essay we read a few weeks ago, below are some structured instructions for conducting peer review. Your workshop will be guided by the Feedback Survey below, which is a set of questions you should answer for each of your teammates’ papers.

Here are the general instructions:

1. Out of respect for your team members, please post your drafts (plus process reflection) to your #team channel by Tuesday so your peers have time to read and review before the end of the week. (If you post a Google Doc link make sure you’ve enabled sharing permissions.)

2. Using the questions and Abrams’ flowchart pictured earlier in this module, chat briefly about how you approach workshops, what good feedback is, and what the culture and workflow of your workshop session is going to be.

3. Don’t talk about your essays! First, read without commenting. You can read and make marginalia, underline/highlight what you think the claim is, make notes about what you think the writer’s aims are, etc.

4. Answer all the questions in the Feedback Survey below for each of your teammates’ drafts, and post your answers as a reply to your teammate in your #team channel. This process must be complete by Fri 11:59PM.

5. After receiving feedback, read what your teammates wrote, and discuss any questions you have together as a group. You may want to ask questions about what their comments mean, how they suggest enacting those comments, collaboratively write your way towards enacting those comments, and so on.

Feedback Survey: Unit 2 Draft 1

🛑 Feedback Survey and General Feedback

The Feedback Survey questions are below and should be used in your #team workshops. I’ll interact with you during the week, much like I do with our usual Q&A posts. The General Feedback page will be updated after the workshop week, after I’ve had a chance to review everyone’s drafts on Classes and feedback-related questions in #team.

Answer the below questions for each of your teammates’ drafts. Post your responses to your #team channel as a reply to each teammate (or tag them in your post with @username). Keep Staub’s framework in mind as you answer them!

Important!

No substantive revisions = No credit (Nc). If your revision doesn’t implement feedback given in weekly discussions, workshops, and on the general feedback in a substantive manner, then you’re likely to receive an Nc score.

1. Has the writer included all 6 sources, at least 3 of which are scholarly peer-reviewed articles?
2. Does each of these sources feel as though it is the ideal source for this paper, carefully selected by a writer with simulated authority, or does it feel more like someone quickly choosing sources? What words, phrases, and other textual evidence indicate this?
3. Has the writer written a specific, distinct summary for each of these sources — specific summaries being those that don’t make the articles all “sound the same” or blur together, but those that help readers identify the arguments, methods, the demographics and/or other factors under study, important subclaims specific to each article?
4. Does the writer use the information they provide in these summaries to keep elaborating on, exploring, and complicating their research hypotheses (instead of just using to agree with their research hypotheses)?
5. If sources are used that radically deviate from the geographic location, culture, and demographic the writer’s research hypotheses are focusing on, does the writer try to reconcile those discrepancies by specifically explaining how these different aspects align?
6. Does the writer spend an equal amount of space or time to each source? If not, is it clear why the source(s) they spend more time on are more important than the other ones?
7. Does the writer use transition sentences (the 1st and last sentence of each paragraph) to reflect a clear and essential connection to the claim and to the paragraph that follows?
8. If the writer is using popular publications, do you get the sense that they’ve passed CRAAP, IF I APPLY, and other evaluative tests? Or do they lean towards biased and/or less-than-credible sources, like career advice sites, research boards that are NGOs, university websites, unsubstantiated/op-ed blog posts, Wikipedia or other encyclopedic articles, politically motivated newspapers, chat forums, etc.
9. Does the writer use subheadings that represent the thematic connections in each category? If so, how specifically worded are these subheadings?

Assignment-Related Questions

1. When you compare the draft with the Unit 2 guidelines, what major criteria are absent or need improvement? Tell the writer how they might take care of that.
2. What 2-3 items from the feedback survey questions above feel like top priority items for the writer’s paper?
3. Is there enough background (summarized from the writer’s preliminary research) to explain how the writer’s research hypothesis emerged from the current state of their field? If not, tell the writer what you still need to know to understand that connection.

While I can’t require sync chats with me to go over feedback with you, I highly recommend them if you’re able to manage a 10-20 min coffee chat!

Happy drafting and reviewing!

Exit Writing

🥳 Congratulations on getting through this chapter! Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your process reflection and #team posts as well as any other assigned writing. Make sure to look ahead to future weeks as well to get a sense of when low- and high-stakes writing for the rest of Unit 2 is due.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources