Week 8 Comments and Feedback

My favorite comments that I have received on my blog all include suggestions by the readers. I love seeing their ideas and how they would possibly change the story or include other elements that I did not. I think that the most useful feedback that I can receive includes something along the lines of "Arti, I like _________, but have you thought about _______?". I give feedback to others with the assumption that they can go back and revise their story if they really want to improve it upon my suggestion, so I like to suggest alternative endings, poke holes in things that don't add up, or ask the author to clarify something for me that might confuse another reader. I like to follow the suggested TAG method and tell the author what I liked and why I liked it and then I ask them something that usually can help their story flow better and make more sense if I know the answer. Then I give them a suggestion about ways that they can implement measures to make the story more interesting to read for those who read the story after me. 

I feel as if I get a sense of who people are by commenting on their blogs. I like reading their stories and seeing the things that they are more passionate about pop out. I also like how all of the people in this class have different interests and expertise, so I enjoy feedback that incorporates their own perspective and knowledge so that I can broaden the audience that my story can cater to and learn from them at the same time.

(Image source: cheezburger)

I chose the graphic above because it is something that I truly understood after a terrible research project experience that I had last semester. I remember that I turned in my research proposal and my professor automatically turned it down because it "wasn't feasible". I couldn't understand why my professor didn't have faith that I could conduct the project, so I did another project that was somewhat similar to the original project and what did I learn? I learned that my professor was right. That project was not feasible either. My professor shut down my first project because he didn't want me to spend hours and days researching something, only to come to a dead end due to a lack of data (which happens a lot when you study China!). If I took his feedback into consideration and asked why he thought my project was infeasible instead of why he gave me negative feedback, I could have seen his intention of wanting to make my life easier. Now I am taking another class with him this semester to do another research project with him, learning from the many mistakes I made on the first one!