![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My first entry ended up being a placeholder because I thought I'd be able to just blow off my frustrations, and no such luck, really.
So, my plan today was to go through the red lines which, while a bit time consuming, isn't particularly difficult. Like, 82 pages is a lot but it's not anything rediculous and it's double spaced, and so on. Plus, academically, I'm not a really awful writer.
But I hit the critique and almost all of it is line-by-line stuff. Not grammar, not critique, and not even really clairification, but mostly just re-wording things, re-ordering things in the sentence, replacing one sentence with a similar one that doesn't have the same nuance, and stuff like that.
And my first thought is, why is my chair spending critical time making line notes? By now I know the difference between tone and quality. If I'm reiterating something, chances are, there's a reason. She's aiming a lot at things that look like synonymous repetitions but clearly hasn't considered why I've worded them in the way I have - she's aiming to make the work more concise, and I'm trying to be specific. To my reading, this means either she assumes I'm writing things without thinking or without reason, or the words don't parse as different to her (or not different in a way she's willing to assign meaning to). Or both.
I think it's very likely both. Which means she's assuming I don't know how to write and doesn't think the nuances I've included are meaningful. Possibly she's not even thinking at all, and isn't associating the inclusion of words as attached to any reason - she's just going through and making the work as concise as possible without really paying attention.
That's actually the sloppiest scenerio but absolutely the one I'd bet on - which means my chair is trying to function as a line editor without close reading my essay.
So, I made it 50 pages in and kind of.... I guess I just quit. I know it needs come cleaning up, but I'm not going to just continue to delete nuance. I'm going to go ahead and hit the specific critique on content and clean up whatever seems important for clairity, and as for the rest, well, I've already spent 95 dollars in the upload to ProQuest. Which is a source of anger for me better suited to its own entry.
So, my plan today was to go through the red lines which, while a bit time consuming, isn't particularly difficult. Like, 82 pages is a lot but it's not anything rediculous and it's double spaced, and so on. Plus, academically, I'm not a really awful writer.
But I hit the critique and almost all of it is line-by-line stuff. Not grammar, not critique, and not even really clairification, but mostly just re-wording things, re-ordering things in the sentence, replacing one sentence with a similar one that doesn't have the same nuance, and stuff like that.
And my first thought is, why is my chair spending critical time making line notes? By now I know the difference between tone and quality. If I'm reiterating something, chances are, there's a reason. She's aiming a lot at things that look like synonymous repetitions but clearly hasn't considered why I've worded them in the way I have - she's aiming to make the work more concise, and I'm trying to be specific. To my reading, this means either she assumes I'm writing things without thinking or without reason, or the words don't parse as different to her (or not different in a way she's willing to assign meaning to). Or both.
I think it's very likely both. Which means she's assuming I don't know how to write and doesn't think the nuances I've included are meaningful. Possibly she's not even thinking at all, and isn't associating the inclusion of words as attached to any reason - she's just going through and making the work as concise as possible without really paying attention.
That's actually the sloppiest scenerio but absolutely the one I'd bet on - which means my chair is trying to function as a line editor without close reading my essay.
So, I made it 50 pages in and kind of.... I guess I just quit. I know it needs come cleaning up, but I'm not going to just continue to delete nuance. I'm going to go ahead and hit the specific critique on content and clean up whatever seems important for clairity, and as for the rest, well, I've already spent 95 dollars in the upload to ProQuest. Which is a source of anger for me better suited to its own entry.