So this arrived today. I’ll admit, getting a next day FedEx from my advisor with her comments on my proposal made me feel somewhat important – like a “real” writer getting her manuscript back from her publisher.

Except I am not getting paid for this.

In fact, I’M paying to write this.

And, the only reason it was FedExed was because I was too sick to get off the couch yesterday and go to my research team meeting at BC and get it.

If these realizations were not enough to quell my excitement, reading the comments certainly put a damper on it.

She is a generous, careful reader. She caught mistakes that I catch on my students’ writing – ones that really annoy me, like when they write “people that” instead of “people who.” I mark this error with a marginal comment like “people are not objects.”

Apparently, I make this error, too.

But then there are other comments that are harder to address, like, “You need your voice in here” and “No! You need asceerasdft.”

Asceerasdft? Clearly this is not what she wrote, but that is certainly what it looks like. And trust me, I have tried to ascertain what this word is, especially since it follows such an emphatic no! and I clearly need to be doing this unknown word instead. And it is so important that I do this that the comments were FedExed overnight to me.

Ugh.

Oh, and this pissed me off today, too:

Read the label if you’re not sure what you’re looking at. For the context, read here.