🍎 General Feedback
What Is General Feedback? 💯
After the first draft in each unit, i.e. Draft 1, Draft 3, and Draft 5, I’ll update this page with general feedback — comments about issues that span 90%+ of the papers in the class — to help you identify, locate, and address issues in your teammates’ and your own drafts during subsequent asynchronous peer workshops. (I’ll also participate in these peer workshops, so you’ll have the opportunity to verify if you’re accurately correlating issues on the General Feedback Sheet to your draft.)
By practicing figuring out — from a finite set of options — which bullet points apply to your draft, you’ll get better at recognizing similar issues on your own, making you better able to independently revise your writing across the curriculum.
Be sure to also review my responses to you and your classmates in #classroom discussion and #team activities. More information about assessment of high-stakes projects is on the Alt-Grading System page.
Attention!
Receiving credit for one draft doesn’t mean you don’t need to revise or guarantee that you’ll receive credit for the next draft. In fact, revision between drafts is mandatory.
A Note on Scoring
Important!
Drafts of high-stakes writing are scored on the basis of completion. Drafts that actively work towards the project’s stated purpose, engage with the material, and are unafraid of “getting things wrong” on the way to figuring things out are accepted and will be marked “Cr” for “Credit.” If I can’t accept a draft for credit for substantive reasons, I’ll mark it “Nc” for “No Credit.” “Nc” scores are given if you don’t submit a draft, if your submission doesn’t demonstrate a connection to the assignment or to our course content thus far, or if you did not use feedback provided to the class during weekly Q&A.
Drafts are ungraded to allow you to experiment with how you implement feedback without fear of penalty.
You might be used to writing courses where you’re explicitly told what to do, as though writing and revision are processes that belong to someone else — processes of making corrections that another person notices and tells you how to fix. In reality, revision has to start and end with you! But since writing is also as an activity of thought that’s socially, collaboratively improved, my role as your writing instructor is to provide you with guidance and just enough direction for you to be able to apply your own thinking and figure out what to do with each item on your own after attempting to locate it in your own work on your own. This allows you to think through how to say something — what research or other work needs to be done in order to say something — and then decide how you need to put it into action, based on feedback during workshop weeks and all my answers to all your questions each week.
How to Use This List ✅
During peer workshops, you and your teammates will work with each feedback item as a survey you can complete for each of your drafts; this list is a static document you can more easily reference on your own whenever you work on revision.
When working with this list on your own, I recommend you do the following:
- Read the first bullet point, then read your draft with that bullet point in mind to see if you can catch the issue on your own
- If you locate it, mark it and make notes to yourself regarding how to address it
- Repeat this process with the next bullet point, and the next, and the next!
In my experience, all of the issues that tend to appear on General Feedback Sheets in are fairly common issues in early drafts in core writing classrooms, so don’t feel like you’re alone if you find your draft contains most of the items below!
Types of Feedback
For ease of revision, feedback will be divided into 2 categories: higher-order concerns and lower-order concerns:
Higher-Order Concerns (HOCs) include the most important material in your essay, the “big picture,” macro-level stuff, i.e. the thesis, claim, or controlling idea; specific connections between your interest in the field and the scholarly discourse in the field; development of your research questions and hypothesis (i.e., “what am I investigating, how do I know what I know, what do I expect to find out?”); your analysis of each piece of evidence; and so on.
Lower-Order Concerns (LOCs) include the less important (but not unimportant!) stuff in your essay, like grammar and mechanics: e.g., spelling, fragments, run-ons, punctuation, sentence rhythm variation, word choice.
At least some of the comments on General Feedback Sheets will apply to you. If you’re not sure which even after team workshops, you can always book a coffee chat with me to determine your next move.
Tip!
It also helps to review the Model Student Paper in its entirety, so you have a sense of what you’re working towards.
Qualitative Research Comments
- Research hypothesis. Use your preliminary research and material from Modules 2-5 to reframe your research questions as research hypotheses, i.e. by posing tentative answers to your questions. Your research hypotheses should be exploratory and understanding-oriented and follow the assignment guidelines. (See Assignment- and Research-Specific Comments below for further details.)
- Relevance/necessity of discipline narrative. Your discipline narrative must be relevant to the research hypotheses that you’ll be investigating in your project. In short, the discipline narrative should feel necessary to understanding your interest in and motivations for exploring those particular research hypotheses.
- Simulation of disciplinary authority. Existing scholarly literature and familiarity with contemporary discourse of the field should: 1. play a major role in the development of your research hypotheses, and 2. justify the need for exploring the research problem.
- Make sure that your question does not only come from you but is informed by a couple of passes of the literature. Your question and hypothesis will likely evolve and change as we keep doing research, but your reader should get the sense that you are informed enough by scholars to not be omitting anything obvious.
- If your research questions seem unsubstantiated — e.g., something you think but may not (with a little research) actually be based in statistically significant fact — the next draft may not be accepted.
- Generalization/speculation. Your research question should avoid generalization and speculation.
- For instance, the motives/reasons that people have for behaving a certain way will always be wildly varied; you’ll have to conduct a significant number of interviews, and no amount of interviews will be enough to make the case for an argument.
- You should never be making claims about “people” anyway but about a subset of people that is as specific as it can be. That means considering several factors of identity: race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality and geographic location, a specific type of company/corporation (banking, pharmaceutical, agricultural), a specific type of law, etc.
- Avoid yes/no and obvious research questions. Avoid research hypotheses that are inarguable, factual, or obvious. As discussed in class, research questions/hypotheses whose answers are simply “yes/no” or that can be answered with a fact that the reader could guess before reading your paper, and avoid research questions/hypotheses whose answers can be guessed based on common sense.
- For example, “inarguable” claims might include “Why do people want to major in my field?” or “Why do people endure conflict?”
- Avoid solutions. Your project should be examining the impact of a phenomenon on the professionals working in your field, and should not try to problem-solve as — realistically — you’re not likely to be able to solve the issue in a paper of this length.
- Avoid research hypotheses that are opinions. You can’t argue a claim that is just your opinion, as it only comes from one person and more often than not will not apply widely.
- Focus on why/how. Formulating and then answering questions that are “why” and “how” questions (as opposed to “what,” “which,” etc.) will lead you towards the kinds of exploration needed for this qualitative research project.
- For example, questions like “Is there a positive effect if impoverished families are given free education,” “Will people rely on X law in cases where X law is advantageous to them,” or “Do corporations behave ethically” don’t merit academic inquiry — they’ll just turn into a report.
- Don’t worry about being too specific — this is rarely possible, and there are plenty of workarounds if few results come up when you search Google Scholar or Pace scholarly databases for your exact research questions.
- Specificity. A research hypothesis is specific enough when you honestly can’t make it any more specific — when every aspect of it has been chased to its narrowest point. If it’s too specific later, you can begin to broaden your scope. It’s so much easier to start narrow and go broad than start broad and go narrow.
Assignment-Specific Comments
- Regularly revisit the guidelines! The number one thing that is assessed in your projects isn’t perfect argumentation, grammar, or formatting, but are you paying attention to what the project is asking for and trying to address it in a careful, considered way.
- Your project must focus on a specific problem that affects members of your discipline (e.g., experts, professionals, workers) that keeps coming up in the discourse, explain your interest, and articulate the value of this research. Your questions/hypotheses should consider how this problem manifests in the field, how it affects members of the discipline, and what its overarching ramifications are for your field in general.
- For example, taking risks in critical thinking that don’t work is fine; ignoring that the project investigates a narrow issue that impacts one subset of employees of a field or that the Literature Review has a specific structure suggests you aren’t closely reading the project-specific directions or examples
- The specific organization of your papers is in the assignment guidelines (in the syllabus doc).
- Keep your focus as narrow as possible by limiting the number of directions contained in your research hypotheses; this will reduce the amount of writing you’ll need to do to thoroughly address your hypotheses.
Research Process Comments
- Turn your questions into hypotheses! Your research hypothesis is your answer to your research question(s); this means that — if you didn’t already, then definitely when you revise and expand for later drafts — you must provide a provisional answer to the question you pose, based on what you have seen of the literature (so far) and your own critical thinking. Once you have provisional answers that are narrow and that need sustained academic inquiry, you can delete the questions.
WID Comments
- Use your preliminary research and the resources in the Appendix.
- Make sure to implement feedback as you revise and as you keep writing your way into future drafts.
- Avoid including information that is unnecessary or irrelevant to your claim.
- Avoid saying “certain types,” “a kind of,” “certain people,” etc. Name the types; always answer the question “what kind?” where it can be asked. Refer to earlier feedback posts for guidance. You can use specificity to refine your subsection headings, your summaries of your sources, your analysis, etc.
Annotated Model Paper 1
Read this annotated model paper for insight into how to approach drafting and revising the different sections of the qualitative research project! Note: Another annotated model paper will be posted by the third week of classes!