Digital convenience makes sharing work with the Fellowships and Writing Center a little faceless. You fill out the form, take the vulnerable step of sending off work—unfinished work, at that—for someone else to critique, and then it disappears into the void. What happens on the other end?
Before reading (the fun part!) starts, the process is probably similar to what you think: pieces are assigned internally to a reviewer based on workload and expertise, taking into account the subject matter of the submission and any relevant deadlines or goals. We’re always happy to meet before, after, and while reading your work.
You might also be interested in how we read pieces, what we look for as we try to help you refine your writing. This depends on many things, but there are a few basic principles that I find helpful across most types of academic writing.
First, a caveat: each reader has a different approach, so I can’t speak for everyone. Similarly, every round of review at the FWC starts from two considerations: the genre of the piece (dissertation chapter, fellowship application, conference abstract, etc.) and any requests you, the submitter, make on the intake form. Generally speaking, though, there are three keys I look for as I begin reading, based on the idea that academic writing is fundamentally meant to do one thing: convey to an audience of real people the ideas that you have developed through intellectual labor.
Without further ado, here are the three concepts I start with: clarity, cohesion, and purpose. I’ll say a bit about each.
Clarity is a guiding principle in most types of writing. Our goal is to convey ideas and findings in a way that the intended audience can understand, with a minimal loss of meaning along the way. Although we may take more experimental approaches with creative writing, in academic writing we want the reader to follow our thoughts and find them persuasive. To do this, our writing must mean what we want it to mean when someone who is not in our head reads it. In some sense, clarity is a matter of technical precision, of choosing the right words and phrases and putting them together correctly. This assumes, however, that the ideas underlying the piece are sound, well-developed, and consistent. That brings us to cohesion.
If clarity is a matter of technical execution, cohesion is often one of conceptual diligence. Does the piece progress logically, with each point buttressing or building on the others? When the writing is disjointed in a technical sense, it lacks cohesion, but often this is really a lack of clarity. If there are too many ideas that do not fit into the central premise, it lacks cohesion for a different reason. This is more common than sloppy prose. A piece should include everything it needs to present new information fully and persuasively, and should bring it all together in a way that makes sense. If we can’t see the connection, then it often indicates that there is more work to do in drawing that connection out for the reader, or sometimes that the connection may not be strong enough.
Finally, purpose. This can be the easiest one to read for, but I know from experience that it is hard to keep in focus when in the depths of research and writing. What is this piece of writing meant to do? Does it achieve that aim? Writers often state their purpose up front, and readers at the FWC are practiced in tracking whether your work is pulling in the direction that you tell us it should be. Disciplinary expertise varies, but we usually have at least a sense of whether you get there by the end. The very act of writing can be a great aid in clarifying your purpose, and I find that my own often changes slightly when I sit down to write a first draft.
This is where revision comes in. The good news is that it is almost always easier to make something better than to make something new. The FWC is ready to help.
What does this approach look like in practice? I begin with three read-throughs. On the first, I’m thinking along the lines laid out above: is this piece clear and cohesive, and does it serve its intended purpose? Is that purpose clear to me, the reader? That will, almost always, tell me where I should focus on my second read-through. There’s no point in playing around the edges when the core is muddled or lacking. Reads two and three—when I begin to make comments on the work—are the notes you see, but they always follow from a holistic view of those three elements.
In drafting this blog post, I wonder whether I’ve stuck to my purpose clearly and cohesively. There’s one part I’m not sure works—does anything jump out to you? Let me know what you find; I wonder if it will be the same thing I’m concerned about, or if I have more work to do!
