LibAnswers: Understanding your feedback

Feedback

Assignment feedback often includes statements such as;

• Your writing is too descriptive
• You need a clearer structure
• There is a lack of clarity in your ideas
• You need to be more critical
• You need to support your ideas with academic evidence
• You are not being analytical enough.

How to develop

'Analytical commentary', 'critical analysis', 'evaluation' are all similar ways to express the need to add something to the evidence you are finding and bring together.  At degree or postgraduate level it is not enough just to speak using other peoples words. Students can often be worried about stating their own opinion, but your opinion (and collation) of the evidence you are reading is your critical commentary. 

You can strengthen your work by acknowledging conflicting evidence. This shows that you can critique your own work; you have actively looked for counterarguments, tested your thinking and have come to a carefully considered conclusion.

It can be difficult to work out how to change our writing to improve or understand what feedback is asking us to do differently. See the Critical Thinking toolkit to access useful resources on critical writing.

The "Three voices": When drafting academic writing, it is possible to use different styles of writing to do different jobs, this is sometimes called a voice.

The Bitesize "Developing your critical writing" video on finding your critical voice offers some useful advice on using the "three voices" (the tour guide, the expert and the philosopher's voice) and is a good place to start to improve your writing. A text transcript of the "Developing your critical writing" video is also available.

If you are still having trouble interpreting your feedback, you can book a one-to-one tutorial.