Make Them Reject It!

At a certain point, it is necessary to trust yourself that your work is good enough and ought to be accepted. Some self-doubt is appropriate—after all, there is little logical certainty to be had, and no matter how much data you gather or how many books/articles you read, there are always more data to be gathered and more books/articles to read. But, as a matter of practicality, eventually you must believe in yourself and believe that the work you have done is good work. At that point, it’s necessary to challenge your readers to reject your work.  You don’t want to get rejected, of course. You want to take the attitude that your work should be accepted, and that if someone is going to reject it, they better have damn good reasons for rejecting it.

Eventually, it’s necessary to force the issue with your reviewers—professors, editors, grant reviewers or whoever. It’s necessary for your work to be reviewed, regardless of outcome. In this post, I frame that in terms of “make them reject you,” not “make them accept you,” because I want to focus on the common emotional dynamic that many authors face where expectation of a negative response starts to impede progress. If your progress is delayed by thinking “they’re going to reject it,” then you might benefit from thinking “I have done good work, and I believe that my work should be accepted, and if they don't accept it, they better have a good reason, not some overly general complaint.”

In this post, I am generally writing to people who have brought their project to a certain level of accomplishment—people who have been basically diligent in their research and writing. If you haven’t completed a first draft yet, it’s probably better to finish the first draft and solicit feedback, expecting a critique, rather than “making them reject you”—getting a first draft returned with feedback isn’t a rejection, it’s an opportunity to improve the work.  Still, even during the early stages of a project, it’s good to think “I am going to do good work, and when I’ve finished, they better have damn good reasons if they reject me,” because it’s easy to get hung up thinking “they’ll reject me” at any point in a project.

I’m writing this post because I was recently talking with a scholar at the very end of a dissertation who was trying to respond to unreasonable expectations. A complete draft had been provisionally accepted, and in my eyes, it easily surpassed the quality necessary for a doctoral dissertation.  But the scholar was getting hung up on comments from some of the reviewers—getting hung up trying to make plans to respond to unreasonable complaints. And what was really needed was that the scholar assert that the work in the dissertation was done responsibly and to a reasonable standard. No work is perfect; every work has limits. At a certain point complaints that are logically defensible in the abstract become completely unreasonable in the context of the real practice of research.

When I say unreasonable, I’m thinking of one comment this scholar had received, in particular. One professor had said: “You didn’t come up with these ideas. Where did you get them?” There are contexts in which this might be a reasonable complaint—if, for example, the professor is absolutely certain of a specific source that uses the idea in question—but it is not a generally reasonable complaint inasmuch as the expectation and primary criterion for scholarly success is to come up with something new. The presumption that the scholar did not come up with the ideas is problematic.

A complaint like that must be met with confidence. It must be met with “These are my ideas. I have not read them anywhere else or heard them anywhere else. If you know of someone who has used them, please tell me.”  This doesn’t work, of course, if you want to claim that some well-known, established idea as your own—“every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” for example—but if ideas are really yours, it’s necessary to claim it, and to force the other person to prove you wrong. Say: “I have never seen this before, and I looked for things like it. Have you ever seen it? If so, where? Because I would like to see that source.” Such a response: 1. claims that you have been diligent; 2. forces the reviewer to specify, thus revealing whether the complaint is reasonable (there’s a source you should have used and didn’t) or unreasonable (it’s just an excuse to complain); and 3. it presents you as wanting to use the information (i.e., you want their advice, and you avoid conflict). This kind of response can help defuse complaints that are driven by emotional rather than intellectual motivations. And remember, it’s perfectly possible to independently come up with an idea that someone else has also had (e.g., Newton, Leibniz, and calculus)—it’s not a crime to assert “I haven’t seen that source, and came up with the idea on my own.”

A similarly unreasonable complaint is an open ended “how do you know no one else has done this?” A good scholar takes steps to find all possible resources that touches on the issues in their work. But no scholar, no matter how good, can read everything written. There are simply too many publications for any one person to read or even review them all. A good scholar will take steps to know what has been published in the literature, and then, having taken those steps, should proceed to do his or her own work.  At some point the scholar has to leave previous publications behind.  It should be enough to take diligent action to survey the literature and then to say “I have taken appropriate steps to review the literature, but that does not guarantee that my search did not miss something.”  On a certain level, this problem is something like the more general problem of induction: no matter how many observations an empirical scientist may take, it is always possible that the next observation will not follow the pattern set by previous observations. No matter how many articles you may read on a subject, you cannot guarantee that there will not be some other article that you did not find in previous searches. New articles are published every day--even if you did all the work as of yesterday, that could have changed with new publications.

It must be admitted that it is appropriate for a professor to ask what you have done to ensure that you haven’t missed anything. And it’s not right to be unduly arrogant about the work you have done. But when complaints like “how do you know there isn’t some work you haven’t seen” is combined with a less reasonable complaint like “these ideas aren’t yours; where did they come from,” then it’s appropriate to start to read that complaint as being unreasonable rather than just reasonable.

Ever since David Hume elucidated the problem of induction in the 18th century, empirical science has struggled to negotiate the problem that the next observation may break the pattern of previous observations. You’ve only seen white swans and never a black one? That doesn’t prove that there are no black swans, but still…  You’ve only seen books/articles that address one aspect of an idea, but not another? It doesn’t prove that there are no works that address the other idea, but…

At a certain point—when work has been executed diligently and carefully—you have to ask whether their complaints are reasonable, and you have to assert that your work is worthy. You have to force their hands: make them either reject your work or accept it, but don’t let them implicitly reject it by getting you hung up on unanswerable and unreasonable questions.

At a certain point, you have to force them to take their own stand and explicate their concerns, and if they reject you, either they have good reasons (I mean reasons that seem good to you and worth responding to, as opposed to unanswerable, unreasonable questions like “how do you know you’ve read everything?”) or you challenge their rejection (with, of course, an explanation of why your work ought not respond to their complaint).

Be Willing to Get It Wrong part 2: On the cost of being wrong as a graduate student

In my previous post, and in a video I posted last Friday, I was talking about being willing to get it wrong.  In both the video and the blog post, I assert that the cost of being wrong isn’t that big a problem, and that’s a claim that I don’t make lightly.  This post is to discuss why I believe this is true for graduate students.

Graduate students often get stuck in the writing of their dissertation, and then, as a result of being stuck, fail to produce written material to give their professors. A lot of these writers, I think, are stuck because they don’t feel their work is good enough, and perhaps even feel that they are not good enough to do good work.  One approach to this problem is to focus on how writers are often more self-critical than is best for themselves, and get stuck for this reason (a book on writing blocks argues that self-criticism is one of the big causes of writing blocks), but that focuses on the writer.

In this post, I want to focus on the context: why is it that getting it wrong isn’t that big a deal for graduate students? Why do I assert that the costs of turning in a bad work are generally low? Well, what are the costs?

Firstly, there are the emotional costs of getting negative feedback. I would argue that these are the biggest costs—the main damage from getting bad feedback is emotional. A self-critical person who receives negative feedback will quite possibly struggle a good deal due to negative feedback. This can be a big problem, but there are ways of managing your response to feedback that can help.

Beyond the emotional costs, what are the other potential impacts on a graduate student? Well, those impacts are generally constrained to the context of the university—friends and family do not, typically, even look at a graduate student’s work, so a bad work isn’t going to affect those relationships, and a non-academic employer similarly won’t care whether or not your professor liked a specific work (if your employer is paying for your education, they might care about your standing and progress in your program as a whole, but they won’t generally care about individual pieces of work). So what are some of the possible impacts:

1. Getting kicked out of your program.  This is a form of academic death, I suppose.  Realistically, it’s implausible to imagine a student getting kicked out of a graduate program for submitting an inferior piece of work. It’s plausible to imagine a student getting kicked out of a program for plagiarism, but that’s not really poor quality work (which is difficult to avoid), that’s malfeasance (which is pretty easy to avoid). And it’s pretty easy to imagine a student getting kicked out of a program for regularly turning in poor quality work—but that’s not what I’m focusing on here.  If you have turned in several pieces of inferior work over a long period of time, obviously there will be some anxiety over whether another such inferior work will cause problems, and if you’ve been previously warned that you have to improve your work or get kicked out of your program, then obviously there’s a significant potential negative impact.  But I would wager that’s a real threat to only a few students. Students are far more likely to fear getting kicked out than they are to get kicked out.

2. Damaging your relationship with a professor.  There is a real danger here, and one to take very seriously.  At the same time, I would argue that if your work does actually cause a significant negative reaction from a professor, that’s a good sign to reconsider working with that professor.  There is a world of difference between harsh yet constructive criticism and peevish complaints or ideological agendas.  The kind of professor who would give harsh but real criticism is also likely the kind of professor who will revise their views when new, improved work is submitted (again, acknowledging the different impact of repeated submission of inferior work compared to a single piece). A reasonably mature professor will not carry a grudge against a student for a single piece of poor work. The kind of professor who would be offended—who would carry a grudge—for a single inferior piece of work, is probably not the kind of professor that you really want to work with. (Granting, it’s sometimes desirable to work with professors who are emotionally difficult—but if you choose to do that, you can then manage your relationship and your emotional response to that professor by remembering that the professor’s issues are not related to you personally.)  On the whole, the cost of a single bad piece of work, then, is low. If you are a student who is dealing with writer’s block, it can be very helpful to remember the low cost of a single bad piece of work.

3. Other negative impacts. Realistically, for graduate students, there are very few other negative impacts of poor work.  Poor work could prevent getting a fellowship or grant, and that can be be distressing, but, of course, in the context of grant/fellowship applications, the rejection of a poor work is equivalent to the result of no work: you can’t let fear of rejection stop you from writing and turning in an application because the result of rejection is almost identical to the result of submitting no application at all—rejection and not applying both end in missing the opportunity. I won’t make light of the emotional impact of trying and failing, but isn’t there an almost equal burden in allowing fear of failure to stop you from trying?

Turning in low-quality work can have negative ramifications. But for graduate students, the dangers are relatively slight, particularly when compared to the dangers of letting fear of error interfere with the progress of your writing and research. Take chances, experiment, and face censure for your actions rather than fearing error, inviting paralysis, and earning censure for not having done work. For the vast majority of graduate students, the costs of getting it wrong are relatively low compared to the costs of delaying submission of a work.

No Apologies for Writing

When I told my friend Eve about my blog, I broke a rule that I generally propound in terms of presenting work: don't apologize. So writing my previous entry about Eve brought this to mind.

Speaking for myself, it's one thing to write for an anonymous world, and something different to write for someone I know. And something different to show work to a friend than to a professor or other person in a professional context.

But it's neither necessary nor appropriate to apologize for writing (presuming, of course, it's not writing of a nature that could be considered offensive--racist, perhaps).

Presumably you have done what you could do in the time you had, with the resources available to you. That is nothing to apologize for. And if you've been wasting time, out playing, why apologize for that. Or at least why apologize to someone else for that? It's your choice of what to do with your life.

I find in presenting my writing and in the writing itself, I have a tendency to apologize for my positions or to apologize for the quality or character. It is a tendency that I try to eliminate from my writing, because I don't think it helps make it better.

If we expect criticism, or if we are good at criticizing ourselves, then we look at our work and see the imperfections and the problems. But that is not how others are looking at the work.

Take me, for example. I'm good at finding problems--that's part of what makes me an effective editor. But my aim in reading is not to find problems. Yes, when I'm reading as an editor, I am looking for problems, but when I'm looking at a piece of work just to get an idea of what it is, as I do when making an estimate, I'm looking to see what the work has to offer--to see its strengths, its value and significance.

Of course people present their work to me with apologies all the time--which is a little silly because my role is to help clean up your work--but I think it's natural to have some apprehension that our work will not be treated lovingly. And if we are closely associating ourselves with our work, then that can be painful.

The worst thing about apologizing for work that we've done--whatever faults we might that the work has--is that apologizing sets the reader looking for the problems. And why would we want to do that? There may be a time and place to inform your reader of flaws in your document (especially when working on a dissertation), but even such indication of flaws should not be presented as a problem to apologize for, but as a part of the "to do" list.

If we can learn to let the work speak for itself, our luck, I think, will be better.