🍎 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

1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Generalization/speculation. Your research question should avoid generalization and speculation.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. For example, “inarguable” claims might include “Why do people want to major in my field?” or “Why do people endure conflict?”
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. It’s always better to use keywords that return too few sources for your literature review and then expand your research questions and alter your keywords than it is to have to refashion a general research hypothesis into something more specific.
18. Summarizing sources. Your sources must be summarized so specifically that a reader can distinguish clearly between them. For instance: if you say something like “The authors found ways to cope with X” then you should identify what those ways are and explain all of them in detail. Imagine that you’re giving these summaries to a friend who didn’t do the readings but has to get an “A” on a classroom presentation on them — that’s the level of specificity you’re looking for. Thus, avoid offering general or broad summaries of the sources you’re using: e.g., if you are discussing a medical study that concludes that women are disbelieved in their complaints about pain, your summary should include the details that make this study unique. Remember, many articles fall into broad categories of theme, argument, school of thought — you’ve selected the articles you’re working with for a reason, and your readers should be able to grasp that reason from the summaries themselves. Each source should read as distinct from the other sources you’re using and from the larger body of scholarship to which they belong.
19. Reduce variables! Try to find sources that are about the same geographic location and demographic, or you will have to account for the differences — e.g., you’ll have to tell the reader how an article about a study finding high rates of burnout in healthcare workers in the U.S. in 2020 aligns with a study finding high rates of compassion fatigue in healthcare workers in Sudan in 2023: the first source reflects health-related impacts like COVID, the second source reflects social/ethnic impacts like genocide. Articles about different places can still work together, but it’s your job to show the reader how they can be reconciled despite their differences. This is not something that can be shortcut — trying to get around it with sentences like “These articles are about different places, but they still show high rates of burnout” indicates to the reader that you may not be carefully choosing or reading sources and may not be confident in the material. You’ll also need to account for other variables (e.g., if all your articles are about burnout in healthcare professions during COVID, you can reasonably conclude that the pandemic amplified burnout…but you can’t conclude anything about burnout outside of the pandemic). This may also mean accounting for the differences between that culture and American mainstream culture and explain why the research is still useful.
20. Being detailed does not mean writing about everything! Being detailed means being precise, i.e. quality over quantity. A page-long summary of an article doesn’t help your reader much — you don’t want them to feel as though they should be reading the articles you cite instead of your work.
21. Balance. You should spend an equal amount of space on each of your secondary sources; if you spend more time on a source, make sure to signal to the reader that that source is more important than the other ones and indicate why.
22. Transitions. Transition sentences (the first and last sentence of each paragraph) must reflect a clear and essential connection to the claim and to the paragraph that follows. For organizational purposes, your transition sentences should signal how your secondary sources connect back to your research hypothesis. Don’t just list “this article, the next article, etc.”
23. Relevance of information. Everything you include in your literature review summaries should explicitly explain or expand on at least one aspect of your research hypotheses.

Assignment-Specific Comments

1. 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.
2. Incorporate feedback. You must address all instructor feedback to demonstrate engagement in the course and assignment goals. This includes content- and craft-related feedback in weekly #classroom Q&A responses, comments provided in #team, and any direct feedback given to you in any other channel of communication.
3. Organization. The specific organization of your papers is in the assignment guidelines. This project is scaffolded, so every draft submission should include your whole paper, i.e. Unit 2 Draft 1 should include both the Research Introduction and Literature Review sections.
4. RQs/RHs. 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.
5. Given all the work we’ve done with the Lit Review tutorial and matrix and Unit 2, you should have 6 peer-reviewed sources in your Literature Review section. If you don’t, the draft wasn’t likely to receive credit.
6. Your literature review at this point should not look like your annotated bibliography. That is, your citations will not just be pasted in, they will be summarized and synthesized in paragraph form, and they will be divided into clear subsections (3 under each) and applied back to your research question. You should remove signals to yourself like “Source 1, 2, etc.” and the word “Subsection” in the subsection headings. You also should avoid any evaluative language used in the annotated bibliography, such as why you’re using the article. At this point, all 6 sources must be included. You should enact correct in-text citation, like using author’s last names instead of full titles or “Article #.”
7. Make sure you’re using at least 3 peer-reviewed scholarly literature articles published in scholarly journals. You may use up to 3 popular publications, but these must be from credible sources as well, i.e. do not use articles you find on career advice sites, research boards that are NGOs, university websites, blog posts, Wikipedia or other encyclopedic articles, etc. (In some ways, using only peer-reviewed scholarly articles makes for a stronger research project and is easier on you, because you can more easily evaluate the credibility of scholarly articles.)
8. Make sure you’re using two subheadings! So far you should have: Research Introduction and Literature Review, and within Literature Review, Introduction; [Name of Themed Subsection 1]; [Name of Themed Subsection 2]; Conclusion. In the Literature Review section, you don’t need to say “Subsection #: Title” — just the title is fine.
9. In your introductory and conclusion paragraphs of the Literature Review, you should draw connections between the sources — first, in the intro, to connect them to the theme of the subsection; second, in the conclusion, to connect them to each other. Use authors’ last names (which you should mention in the summaries as well) to refer to each article.
10. A good model for summarizing and integrating articles is right in front of you: in the articles you used for your Literature Review! Examine how these authors introduce, contextualize, summarize, and apply the research articles they cite.
11. Make sure to mention particularly useful models, frameworks, or concepts in your summaries — the ideas that you’ll resurrect later in your Discussion section. Take 1-2 paragraphs for each summary if you need the space to do this work thoroughly.
12. To “test” the importance or relevance of the information you’ve included in a summary, try asking: Have I concisely paraphrased the arguments and ideas emphasized in this article, whether they perfectly align with my research hypotheses or not? Have I summarized this article in a way that will lead readers in the directions I want, i.e. towards some yet-unexplored/under-explored aspect of my claim? Are my informational priorities clear, i.e. which one idea from this article do I plan to integrate outside of the literature review (in the Discussion) by applying it to my own findings?

Research Process Comments

1. 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.
2. Limit your scope. 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.
3. Search terms. Being hyperspecific with your word choices when entering them into the search engine allows for more concentrated and precise results in the articles and information that search yields.
4. Consider a BEAM approach to using sources. The BEAM Method asks you to think about the purpose of a source, how you intend to use it, instead of focusing on the content of the article. This can help you achieve a balance amongst your sources and figure out which articles have the most “value” for your paper. For this project, “A” sources are always strongest, while “M” sources might offer useful frameworks.
5. In your Literature Review summaries, avoid quoting or applying other authors’ supporting evidence, quotes from sources they quote, or the specifics of their case studies, etc. Focus instead on using their arguments and ideas (this would be the “A” in the BEAM approach linked above).
6. Like Chekhov’s gun in theater and film — where a gun shown in the first act must go off in the third, as an object the audience imparts significance to — your literature review shouldn’t present information once and abandon it. In fact, you should assume that readers will impart significance to any information you convey to them and will expect that information to resurface in your paper as you continue to construct your argument. Remember to take note of the key information you’re describing in each paragraph so that you can synthesize it with reference to specific details in your Literature Review’s conclusion and reference it in your Discussion and Conclusion sections.
7. Use Purdue OWL’s APA or MLA guide (depending on what you’re using) to format your Works Cited. Make sure to avoid common pitfalls with in-text citations, like calling authors by their first name, or forgetting to include page numbers (depending on the citation style you’re using).

WID Comments

1. Use your preliminary research and the resources in the Appendix.
2. Make sure to implement feedback as you revise and as you keep writing your way into future drafts.
3. Avoid including information that is unnecessary or irrelevant to your claim.
4. 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.
5. Avoid judgment-based words in your literature review like “good” or “bad” and words like “positive” and “negative,” which are difficult to substantiate. Saying “this article amazingly does XYZ” isn’t convincing and can sound like you’re forcing your opinion onto your reader — if the article really does XYZ well, then your summary and use of the ideas should demonstrate this.
6. Avoid repeating the same information in several sentences. If you need 2-3 “fluff” sentences to help you get to a strong fourth version of what you want to say, delete the prior 2-3. Repetition like this also calls attention to how general and broad the sentence is. If you have too many repeated sentences like this, you risk sounding like you’re trying to BS your way to the word count.
7. Avoid using general language in your transition sentences and in paragraphs meant to introduce, conclude, or otherwise contextualize a section of the paper: e.g., “scholars say” or “studies show” undermine the close-reading and analytical work you’ve been doing in your secondary and primary research.

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!