How to Decode Vague Dissertation Feedback

Your committee said something like "needs more" or "synthesize" or your alignment is off, and you have absolutely no idea what this means. I've sat on over 300 dissertation committees, and getting vague comments that can't be understood can get students stuck in that revision loop. In this video, I'm going to decode the most common vague committee comments and tell you exactly what your committee member is is looking for or asking for and give you a framework to respond and move forward instead of spinning your wheels. If you need help with your dissertation, click the link in the description to join our free dissertation help community. One of the comments you see is, "Be consistent." Well, be consistent on what? So, if the, if "be consistent" is around a term or even like a problem statement or something like that, the first step is go search for the term. Or problem statement elsewhere in your document. Because what they're most likely saying is, you've said this differently elsewhere, or it was capitalized here, but it's not capitalized there. So the be consistent is just saying it's different somewhere else. A variation on be consistent is gonna be when you use acronyms and you haven't explained what they are. So always, before you use an acronym, Always explain what it is. And then in parentheses, put the acronym. From then on, you can use the acronym. But it can be frustrating to a committee member to all of a sudden show up and say, "Wow, here's 4 acronyms in a row and I don't even know what they mean." Or, "I think I know what they mean, but you know, who knows what they're talking about with it?" So that's part of the be consistent thing. Next would be, "Well, that's different than what you said." Problem statement, purpose, whatever. So what they're telling you is go look, make sure you're saying the same thing. It's a kind of a variation on be consistent, but you will see frequently, and I was reading a document the other day that had a problem statement that said one thing and a purpose that said something a little bit different, and then research questions that again said something a little bit different. And then interestingly, 2 chapters later when they reintroduced the research questions, there were different research questions and there were a different number of research questions. So that's what they're referring to many times without saying, hey, in chapter 1 you said this, but in chapter 3 you said that. And if you get feedback that's that thorough, that's easy to respond to. Now, the dreaded comments you get is, give me more. So when you're looking at your problem statement and your purpose, you might say, and you think they're fine, and they say, well, no, you know, they're not consistent, or you said it differently here. And one, first, before I even go further. Every time you say the problem statement, use the same wording, the exact same wording. Then you avoid that problem. Every time you say the purpose, the exact same wording. Okay? Every time you have research question 1, exact same wording. So that's gonna eliminate a lot of it. However, let's see the difference between a problem statement and the purpose, which are supposed to be in alignment and going the same direction. But for example, I was working on someone's work recently and they talked about the problem being such and such and such and such in Nigeria. And then when they got to the purpose, that was pretty well aligned until they got to Africa. Yeah, Nigeria is part of Africa, but it's not all of Africa. So either it's Africa in the problem statement and Africa in the purpose, or Nigeria in the problem statement and Nigeria in the purpose. And the same thing with the research questions. Be consistent with that. Now, if you get feedback that goes to, "Well, give me more." Okay, that can be really confusing. Give me more of what? And where is it? If it's in your literature review section, they're telling you, you haven't provided enough literature to support what you want to do. You have— or for example, many people will provide one source and say, "That's— this backs it up." Your committee wants to know that you understand the breadth of the literature And also the depth of it. And, you know, over time, specifically the last 5 years typically, but you know, what has been said and how does it integrate? Okay. So give me more means they're looking for you to show that you have a full grasp on things. If it's give me more in your results section, that means I need to see more than yes or more than it was significant. Or the theme was XYZ. I need to know how that theme got developed. I need to know how you got to significance and what supports it. And then eventually I need to know what it all means. Some people get tired as they get to the end and they just say, okay, here it is, you figure it out. And that's when the committee gets upset, when you in effect say you figure it out, because they're looking for you to explain to them what it means. You'll get comments like, You can't answer that question with this data. What they're saying is, have you looked at your data and understand what your data is and what you're gonna get for responses? Will that fit in the analysis that you're doing? And will the answer that you get allow you to answer the research question that you have? So, they're telling you that they don't see how those all connect. And they may, but you haven't explained it. So, they're asking you to go back to your questions, go back to your analysis, you're gonna use and go back to what the actual data's going to be. Because for example, maybe you're using a survey and it's a Likert-type scale and you're gonna get responses that are strongly disagree through strongly agree and have 5 possible responses. And your analysis you've said you're gonna do requires continuous data. Well, Likert data isn't continuous and you haven't addressed that. So, you have to address that to show them how it gets there, how you get from your Likert data to your continuous data to being able to answer your questions. So, many times this type of comment is, "You haven't showed me enough that you understand how to get there." Because you're gonna find a number of times that comments are probing to see if you fully understand what you're doing. Now, another type of comment you're going to get is, well, that's not APA, assuming you're using the APA style. This can be true. You need to provide them what they are, you know, the requirements of your school. And if your school is using APA 7, you need to use APA 7. A comment I'm seeing a little more frequently right now is, oh, that's an anthropomorphism and you can't use anthropomorphism. Meaning you're giving an inanimate object human-like qualities. "The research found." Well, research can't find anything, only people can. Okay, this was a bigger deal 10 years ago, but under APA 7, it's a little more lenient on that. So when you get a question like that, a statement like that, what that means is somebody is a stickler for anthropomorphisms and/or following an older version of this. I worked with someone, oh, this had to be over a year ago, and they got comments back from one of their committee members, and I think it was on their proposal, and they had 272 comments, and they sent it to me, and they called me, and they were upset. How could I have 272 comments on this? And I read through it, and I had the university's guidelines, and many, many, many, many, many of the comments weren't in compliance with the university's guidelines. So I did a very quick search and found out that this faculty member worked at multiple universities. And we figured out that this faculty member was using the criteria of University B to evaluate a paper from University A. And of the 272, I think I said it was, about 242 of them went away when we used the appropriate criteria. So we explained it to them, explained it to the chair, And that person was embarrassed and became their biggest supporter. And then at the next round, oh yeah, it's fine. Don't worry. So sometimes comments come from perhaps a sense of helping, but maybe from the wrong center. So you don't have to blindly respond to comments. You can look at them. Okay. And when we do respond to comments, some people ask for, or sometimes it's rarely a bad idea to do this, is to provide a change matrix. Meaning, and the change matrix is incredibly complex. It's a piece of paper or a file, and you got 4 columns. And in the first column might be the page number, and the second column might have what was originally there. The third column might be the comment that was made, and in the fourth column, how you addressed it. And how you addressed it could be, great point, I've changed it to this, or I've added more references, et cetera. Or I hear what you're saying, "and I've kept it this way because here's a citation," et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes they, again, they may be probing to see how ready you are to handle comments on things like that. And I've been in situations where there have been comments and encouraged the student to respond supporting their position, and more often than not, the faculty member will say, "Oh, all right, see where you're going." Okay, there's foundation for this. Let's go. But the change matrix can be really helpful. And another area the change matrix can be helpful is you submitted your document. It's 78 pages for a proposal maybe, or 132 pages for a final dissertation. And now you've made corrections. If you give them a change matrix, they're probably busy. Many will just go look at the change matrix and they won't reread the entire document. And by just looking at the change matrix, they can figure, okay, that's been done. Oh, here's what they did. I'll just go quickly check check that one. Great, it's done. It's faster for you and faster for them to move forward. So you get a comment that's something like, needs more depth. That's a correlation on gimme more, but it's saying, okay, you got one or two people cited here, but there's a whole history here. I want to know that you get the whole history. I want to know that there's support beyond Jones 2024, because I know and I put in my dissertation all these other things, so you're gonna have to put all those other things in your dissertation. So it's basically saying support this with more than just this one thin piece of research. Give me the breadth and depth of it. And, and more depth can be many other places other than your literature review. It could be in your theoretical or conceptual framework where you're just saying, yeah, Maslow said this. Well, who's said stuff after Maslow? For example, if you're using Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Or it could be in your results section. Okay, it's 4 is the answer. What does 4 mean? Where'd 4 come from? How'd you get to the number 4? Or how'd you get to the theme of school lunch is good? Where did that come from? Who supports that? And in qualitative, you see many times they'll have a theme and then they'll have quotes from a couple of people that support that theme. And try to spread your quotes around. Don't always have participant 7, be the one who's providing a quote for something. And also try to have more than one person who's got a quote to support that. A very popular comment is alignment, question mark, or the alignment is off, or this is not in alignment. And alignment ultimately is your title, but that's easy, your problem statement, your purpose, and your research questions. And what they're saying is if you're out of alignment or if the alignment's off or just alignment, They're saying they're not the same. Your problem and your purpose and your research questions go in different directions. I read one this morning that talked about a certain thing in the problem and about in the southeastern United States. And then in the purpose, it talked about central Oklahoma. That's different. Okay. What is it? Southeastern United States or central Oklahoma? So that's what they're getting at is everywhere you say it, say it the same way and make sure they all work together. Because the problem with alignment being off, you can't do your study. There's, there's no support for it because you're going in different directions on things. So pretty much any results work because you don't have a specific guideline for what results you're looking for. And when I say any results work, that means your committee is not going to accept it because it's not answering a question that's supported by problem and purpose. So let's talk about, hey, this, this could be tighter. That can mean there's a lot of extra words in here that don't really support where you're going. It can also mean a variation of, you said this earlier, you don't need to say it again. That's a variation of that comment because you're going to get, wow, you just said this. And it's easy to do, especially if you sit down at different times to write things and it's an important point. Oh yeah, I better mention this. And it's, you know, editing our own work sometimes is very difficult because we just get going, "Uh-huh, yeah, all right, I remember that, yep, flip, yeah." And we just get into the head nodding and we aren't actually reading what we've written. So tightening is them saying, "Make sure every word, every sentence serves a purpose, is there to move this forward, and it's not just fluff." Another place you'll see this is if you've edited things. You've gotten comments in the past and you've made some suggestions or some changes, but you haven't actually looked within the paragraph or on the page to see how that fits with everything else that was there before. Oh, here comes one of my favorites: synthesize. Okay, maybe I should do that with jazz hands. What they're saying, and this is particularly common in a literature review section, and just to clarify, This is a review of the literature, not a list of the literature. Because what many people do is they'll spend a great deal of time finding literature, and they'll report on the 72 articles that they found, and they'll give a summary of each of the 72 articles and put them in the right sections and all this other stuff. And it's material, that's right, but you have not shown how they interact, how they relate. How they, how you can synthesize that material into one argument. Meaning I've got a list, and that includes Fowler 1987 said this, and my next paragraph has Tippins 2022 says this, and my next paragraph has Johnson 2024 says this, and now I've got a new subheading. But do I know, or have I shared with the reader, what Tippins has to do with Fowler or Fowler has to do with Johnson or how they interrelate? No. I need to show my reader, my committee, that I get how these documents interrelate and how that becomes part of the overall literature. So when they say synthesize, they're saying you gave me a list or what some people call a string of pearls. You just Yeah, list, list, list, list, list, list. But you haven't told me anything about how that list interacts with itself and all the members of it. Expand on this or be more analytic, things like that. Or what they're saying is, yes, you've given me the theme or you've given me the number, but what does it mean? For example, just in a class like in a finance class, you do a ratio calculation. And somebody can do ratios, and ratios are not incredibly difficult. You could do them in 3rd grade because all you have to do is divide. Okay, in this case, you do need to know what you're dividing, and you come up with a ratio and the answer is 2, and you're all happy and you report it, and here's 2, and the instructor is going to say, great, what does 2 mean? You know, 2 is great, it shows me you divide great, you get an A+ and a star for 3rd grade, but what does it mean? Tell me how in the scope of your literature What does 2 mean? Is that good? Is that bad? Is that growing? Is it shrinking? And that's what they're asking for. To expand, give me more than, oh yes, it's 1.75. Okay, 1.75, great. Is that statistically significant? Is it not significant? Or the theme is XYZ. Is that, you know, what does that mean? So they're saying, good, great, you get a star for third grade, but if you want a doctorate, and you want your star on your forehead for your doctorate, you have to do more than just report what the number or the theme is. You have to tell me what it means. So if you get something where a committee member says, well, this has been a waste of my time, or you lack the skills to be able to complete this, we're moving beyond something you just can quickly respond to. This is where I would first have a conversation with my chair. And if it's your chair that said that, then the conversation ends there. But to try to find out where they're coming from. This has been a waste of my time. Why has it been a waste of my— their time? Do they already— are they saying that— and it could be that they're saying this has already been done, or they could be saying your writing skills need improvement. And look, everybody who gets into a doctoral program improves on their writing skills by doing it over and over again, and they're writing in a new language, which is academic writing, versus the writing you do on a day-to-day basis or even in creative writing. So it is something to get better at. But engaging with the people who make comments like that is where you're going to make improvements, but also find out more what they mean. Because this has been a waste of my time means how so? Meaning you've already read this before and it was already all set. You didn't need to see it again. Or does it mean that it's already been done? So it's asking questions such as, I really appreciate the comments. I'm trying to understand so I can improve here. If it— when it's been a waste of your time, in what ways was it a waste of your time? How can I make this better so that I can get to the end? So probably the hardest thing to decipher for many people is when they put a question mark there. What does that mean? Well, first, read the sentence because sometimes there's a question mark there. Because there's words missing in the sentence, or it's an incomplete sentence and it was faster for them to write question mark than incomplete sentence. So sometimes a question mark is very shorthand for, hey, there's words missing here. So always go back and start with, okay, what was there? Does it make sense? If you read your sentence and it makes sense to you, I would suggest having someone else read it and see if they get it too. And if now we get a couple of people who understand it, then we have to go back and ask, okay, I'm not sure what you were asking. Sometimes people will put a comment or a question mark in there as like a reference to themselves if they go back through and then they'll forget. So there's this tanging question mark and it's like, I'm not really sure why I put that there. You start with what you've written and if you think it's fine and you've gotten confirmation that it's fine, then you can question, maybe not with a question mark, the person who put it there and ask them, what exactly was this questioning? I want to be able to give you the document you're looking for. One way that you see question marks sometimes like that, or some, they say this is ambiguous. Sometimes people will use the same word in a sentence to mean different things. The factors that are important in this research are supported by the factors that these people have reported. Well, What factors? And they're gonna, you know, a lot of people just put two question marks or something like that. Or when you say factors, what do you mean? So they're asking you to be incredibly specific and precise in your writing. If somebody writes improve this section first, that's a comparison, meaning you have to do better at something or do more of something. So one of the pieces of advice I give to almost everybody I work with is go find a dissertation that's been recently approved that your chair and/or committee members have served on, and then look at that section to see, "Oh, well, they've accepted this section. Let me compare my— what I have to what they have. Oh, they've added these types of things." So when you have something that has gotten the stamp of approval to compare yours against, now you can see how to enhance, improve, elevate what you've done. Or if you can't find that, questions. Okay, I'm looking forward to improving this. Are there suggestions as to what's missing or what I can add? Sometimes you'll get a comment like, I see what you've said here, but I don't understand how you got there. Or, I know what you're trying to say, but the wording that you've used is confusing. And they're asking you for variations of tightening this up, cleaning it up, You don't have to go in so many different directions to get there. It's what is it you want to accomplish? What are you saying? And actually say it. There's a whole bunch of phrases that get used in dissertations because people think, well, however, or it seems to me that, and these little parenthetical phrases which aren't needed at all and get people confused along the way. Just start there. Jones said, This is more direct writing. So the more direct you can be, the less confusing it can be, and the better your message is going to get across. If you get a comment like, "Okay, but what's your opinion?" or "Where's your voice in this?" that's typically going to be found more often in Chapter 5, where it's, you know, "What does all this mean? How are you bringing it all together? What other research should be done?" It's where you get to flex your academic muscles a little more. Showing that. In Chapter 2, there's not a lot of this. It's when you're synthesizing or integrating your literature together. You're integrating what a lot of people have done, not what you think is important at that point. So your voice gets a lot more opportunities at the end when you're saying, here's what it means, here's what— how this work integrates with the previous literature, and here's what other future research should be done based on what's happened here. So if you get comments like, "This is wishy-washy," or, "This is not critical enough," they're variations on a theme, maybe two sides of the same coin. Refer back to the purpose of research, and that's to answer the question. It's not to prove anything. We don't prove anything. So many times we are couching what we're saying with limits. This, uh, these findings suggest, this study shows that the perceptions of those involved in this type of work lean towards or suggest that this is an answer. But we're not gonna come out and say, I have proven that X equals Y. So what that means is I don't say, you know, it kind of seems that if you look at X, then, you know, maybe Y might show up. That's wishy-washy. In that case, based on the results of this study, Y, X suggests that Y is an important outcome. Or is a tact to follow in solving this issue. But you're not saying X— when X is here, Y happens. Okay, you're not getting so wishy-washy that I can't even figure out if X and Y are related. But on the other hand, I'm not so saying X and Y are perfectly correlated and always happen. And we're not showing that. We're just showing I'm showing that this is the case here. It suggests that this is the case here. So you're learning to state results but couch them in the terms of the limits of your study because you're going to have a, a limitation section and a delimitation section, and you're going to be able to say, I can say this within the boundaries of what I've done. Probably one of the most frustrating things that happens to a doctoral student is when there's contradictions. Either two committee members in the same document, or what might be even more frustrating is one committee member says to do this, and then when you do it, they say, "No, take that out." Remember, your committee members are busy. They're not spending full-time thinking about you and your document. They get your document to review, and they look at it and say, "You know, this could help if they added this material." And then you make changes to it, including the change they asked for, as well as others. And they look at it again and say, "Oh no, take that out. It doesn't help it at all." It can be frustrating, but it can also be that they wanted to see I see that there. And then say, oh, okay, no, it didn't work. Okay, take it out. Eventually we gotta get to it's an it's okay spot. And that's when you work with your chair to be saying, and now here's where we are and we're gonna move forward with this. Answered their comments and you've used a change matrix and shown them that here it is. Now we can move forward. And typically they're gonna be okay. Because they wanted to see it and they see that you did it and you tried it, but it didn't work. Or you responded with a change matrix saying, here's why it wouldn't work. But you get beyond that contradictory within one person. Now, if we've got two people contradicting in the same document, that can be frustrating. So you try to answer both as best you can. Now, one says, take this out, and another one says, expand it. Well, one of the ways you can do that is expand a little or take it out, put it in an appendix, and then it's, it's supported there, but it's not in the document. Because sometimes documents are so full of charts and graphs, it's hard to actually read the document. So they're saying, get rid of this. When somebody else is saying, I really like this point. Well, you can keep the point, just refer to the appendix. But if it's about a theoretical issue or about reference or something like that, You, you know, first step, go to the change matrix. Here's why this is here to support this. Second step, conversation with your chair, ultimately deciding which committee member I want to keep happy in this situation. Long term, it can be frustrating to say, hey, this is good, or you've done a good job, great, but is this going to be a good job at the next level? So thank you for that response. So what you're telling me is this is sufficient for defense. So probe and then get them to commit. And when they have to commit, they're either going to say yes or, oh, well, if on that basis, then I think you should do X, Y, and Z.