3 more lessons I learned in grad school

on affective responses, empty filler words, and why I don't hate Reader 2

Hello, reader.

Today, I come to you with three more lessons I learned during graduate school. These lessons lean into the nitty-gritty of the grad school experience — and I’ll say some of them may feel like stinging indictments anywhere outside of the academic arena. I’m okay with that. They are real things I learned within that arena and they helped me navigate it.

Let’s get into it.

1) Liking or not liking a story is not an adequate measure of that story’s effect.

How you respond to a piece of writing is meaningful information. If you read a novel and absolutely love everything about it, that may aid you in developing the stamina to read it again and again, so that you can write something about it. So that you can make a strong argument about it, or read all the academic research on it, or even teach it in a class.

Likewise, if you really hated something, like, say, a mid-season episode of what is otherwise your favorite TV show of all time, or the most popular novel on the charts last week, that is also meaningful information.

It’s what you do with that information that matters.

I’m sorry to tell you, your personal response to a work of literature is not the sum measure of how effective a story was as a story. This is why book reviews, in my not-always-humble opinion, are mostly bullshit. Most of them are written like DoorDash food reviews: “Arrived hot! Great sauce! Will order again!” A purely emotional response to how gratifying a consumptive experience has been. Five stars! Or: “Egg rolls were soggy. Rice was cold. Not impressed.” Sounds like a terrible dinner and a terrible mood to go with it. Makes sense. And hence: two stars.

But stories are not commodities—and thusly evade most strategies we have developed for responding to our world.

In fact, the stories you loathed or got bored with or included plot points or characters with whom you could not and did not want to identify—or included people you judged or thought stupid or assumed foolish—have a lot to teach you. The stories you adored and thought perfect—they have much to teach you, as well.

Graduate school taught me that my emotional response to literature is a beautiful and meaningful thing. That the way I feel when I read Edith Wharton or Nella Larsen or Audre Lorde or Michel Foucault is indeed a sacred, special experience. And, when it comes to analysis, these experiences are only the starting point. They are not the sum total valuation of what a piece of writing means.

Literature is crafted—it is designed—to evoke emotional responses in you. If you’re having an emotional response to a story, that means the story did its job. Your emotional response is less a marker of your hard work as a reader, and more a marker of the sacred interaction that can occur between a creator and a person who experience their creation. (Ask me how this applies to Frankenstein sometime!)

So…what are you going to do with your response? That’s where analysis begins.

2) “Interesting” is an empty word.

One of my favorite professors stopped our class discussion mid-question one week to ask us to answer his upcoming inquiries without using the word “interesting.”

If you’ve ever been in a literature class, I’m sure you’ve heard people use “interesting” as a kind of filler word:

“I thought the way Hemingway wrote the scene was interesting.”

“Yeah, I thought that the Havisham character was interesting.”

“I really liked the end of Passing! I thought it was interesting!”

These are all different ways of saying:

“I don’t have anything specific to say.”

“There’s something there, but I didn’t think about it.”

“I don’t know what I think.”

Push on the word “interesting” and you start to crack open an actual, substantive conversation:

What is interesting about the way Hemingway wrote that scene? Was it the punctuation? The tone? The words he used?

Why did you think that character was interesting? What about them caught your attention? Interesting in good way? Or a bad way?

What happened at the end of the novel? Was there a twist that surprised you? Was there a sentence that took your breath away?

“Interesting” is just a filler word. It’s a linguistic gesture toward an idea, but it is not, in itself, an idea. It’s perhaps an acknowledgement that something cool or weird or surprising is there, but it is empty without elaboration.

These days, whenever I find my curiosity piqued and I think, “huh! that’s interesting!” I recognize that moment not as a resting place, but as an invitation to keep going. Stay curious. Find out why I am interested.

3) Sometimes, Reader 2 is trying to help you.

A lot—and I mean a lot of work—goes into the academic publishing of literary analysis.

When you send out a literary essay for consideration in an academic publication, you’ve typically been workshopping your piece for at least a year. You’ve worked through dozens of drafts. You’ve perhaps enlisted friends or colleagues for review—and you’ve incentivized them to be blunt in their feedback by promising to do the same for them, next month, when their next piece is ready.

You’ve read your primary text at least a half-dozen times. You’ve read thousands of pages of research; you may have even conducted studies or surveys yourself.

You’ve read, or at least skimmed, 10 back issues of wherever you’re submitting to, or maybe you’ve read everything they’ve published in the last 5 years. You’ve presented portions of your work at conferences, where you’ve networked your ideas and taken meticulous notes during the Q&A.

When you finally send out that essay—overcoming the doubt and anxieties and pervasive feeling that you’ve somehow lost your argument across those 25 double-spaced pages of meticulous prose that adheres to whatever house style you’re encountering—you spend an hour preparing your documents, crafting your email, and likely creating yet another online profile for their highly specific and terribly organized submission portal that looks like it was launched in 1998 and forgotten ever since.

You finally click “Send,” and by so doing, ask an editorial staff to consider your ideas for publication and signal that you’ve done the work. The receiving staff expects that you’ve done your work. If you haven’t, it’s woefully obvious and you’ll receive a quick, and usually terse, “no thank you.”

What you want, actually, is to not hear back for months. (Unless they’ve got an amazing grad student running their Inbox, who may send you an update here and there, between their own courses and exams and teaching responsibilities.)

During this agonizing time, your work is anonymized, so that reviewers cannot see your name on the article itself, and is—if you’re lucky—passed onto one, two, or three likewise anonymous readers who have some level of expertise in your area. They are perhaps on the editorial staff of the journal, or they are professors recently published on the topic, or maybe they’re even cited in your paper.

This is what academia calls the “peer review” process. The review, of your analysis and argument, by folks who know what the hell you’re talking about—and who can, in most instances, verify your essay’s fitness to be part of the conversation they are working hard to host in the pages of their well-regarded academic publication.

But something always seems to happen.

The longstanding joke is that Reader 2—that anonymous, yet expert reader of your work—is always the snippiest. The meanest. The most ruthless and unforgiving. The one who makes snarky comments about your positioning or, god forbid, thinks you overuse the em-dash.

Reader 1 tends to be encouraging and detailed in their thoughtful feedback.

Reader 3, if you have a third reader, is somehow always lighter or funnier in their responses, encouraging you to keep pushing forward.

But Reader 2 is an asshole. They don’t want you to succeed! They’re keeping you from the publication that means everything to you (and your vita)!!! They’re entrenched in the old ways; they’re not reading you generously; they’re a jerk!

Reader 2 has a big stereotype surrounding them, hoarding all the worst traits of the least helpful professors you ever had all to themselves, and taking it all out on your sweet baby essay. Reader 2, really, seems to represent—and put in the margin comments—the pervasive anxiety that our work is really not good enough.

This reading committee has to come to a consensus about your essay:

• Ready to Publish. They can recommend your essay for publication with minor copy edits or slight wording changes. This is the dream; it’s quite rare.

• Revise & Resubmit. They can recommend it for a second review, after a thorough revision process you undertake based on their lengthy feedback. This is the response you cross your fingers for. It’s the second-chance you’re hoping to earn, which will fast-track your resubmission for publication, if you make that damned Reader 2 happy with your revised essay.

• Rejection. They can recommend that your essay not be published in their journal at all. This is the most common response, and the one that helps you know it’s time to knock on other doors.

Okay.

So.

This is all a rather long-winded explanation of what I learned, as I submitted half a dozen essays for academic publication during my PhD: Reader 2 was usually trying help me.

Yes, the joke was that Reader 2 was the worst. And my experience showed me that Reader 2 almost always was the absolute worst.

But Reader 2, when I read a bit closer into their feedback, was also playing an undesirable role. They were being the reader I didn’t want to imagine when I was writing: the snarky one, or the sarcastic one, or the incredibly hard to convince one. The one who doesn’t like my style or doesn’t think I did enough to set-up my thesis or rushed into my first source.

Here I was, picturing my ideal reader, and Reader 2 reminded me to consider that there are lots of kinds of readers, and I’d do well to attune myself to more than my narrow ideal.

It was always Reader 2 who found my clumsiest sentences and took me to task for their absolute derangement. Reader 2 found my grammatical weak points and relentlessly reminded me of the grammatical rule(s) I had broken.

Was Reader 2 nitpicking? Maybe.

Or was Reader 2 giving me the insight I needed to make my arguments more air-tight? To consider more ways my words could be (mis)interpreted? To clarify myself on the page, as much as grammatically and linguistically possible?

Reader 2 is a pain in the ass. And without their help, neither of the two pieces I’m so proud of would’ve ever made it into the world. Without my awareness of their excruciating and sometimes outright unrealistic standard, I’d be worse off.

Thanks for being here

If you’re a graduate student, or have grad school experience, I’d love to hear about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way.

‘Til next time, happy reading.