Reading (and writing) paper comments

            When you get your papers back, turn immediately to the grade, if there is one. Snort, stomp your feet, and roll your eyes. Wait a while. After you have calmed down, read the comments over carefully.

            Now is the time when you learn. The actual process of writing is generally too frantic, late, and over-caffeinated for you to benefit much from the experience. But now, afterwards, when things are calm and you have some critical distance, you can look back on it and see what things worked well and what things did not. Even if she were not going to tear it down and rebuild it, an architect walking through a house she designed last year could make notes that would help her in her next project; that is the way you want to walk through an old paper.

            Read any questions the reader asks and think about how you would answer them. Did the reader misunderstand you or fail to grasp your point? (What was your point?) Why do you think it was misunderstood, and how might you explain it differently to avoid misunderstanding? Look at the marks on the paper. Look at the places the reader liked. What was good about that section? Think about what you did well and remember to do it again next time. Look at the places the reader was confused. What was confusing and how might you have expressed yourself differently? Confusion is never the reader’s fault: it is the writer’s obligation to express herself clearly. So, frustrating though it may be, treat questions and objections not as marks of the reader’s stupidity but as indications of places where your brilliance failed to shine through as clearly as it might have. Make a vow never to let that happen again.

            Even if you are not rewriting a paper, thinking about how you would rewrite it can be just as good. As Tacitus said, “It is in reflecting on the past that we learn from it.”*

* Tacitus didn’t really say that. I just made it up.