How to handle micro-managing co-athor?

[igfy]

My second promotor is a co-author of my manuscripts. She is very involved in my research and ususally gives good advice. However, when it comes to writing the manuscript, she tries to control me and the manuscript in an almost obsessive way. She keeps changing my text, replacing words with their synonyms. For instance if I write "The aim of this research is...", she replaces this with "The goal of the research is...". Every time I send something to her, I spend half of my week going through all the changes she makes. I would be OK with this if her suggestions were based on the content/method of the research, but it's mostly on the style of writing. 

 

English is not our first language, but I consider my English skills good enough for writing an article. However, when I get her revisions, I spend a day correcting grammatical errors and unclear language. She then gets upset when she sees the next version without her "suggestions" in it. I tried suggesting to her that she please leave the english writing to me, but it didnt help.

 

When submitting the last manuscript I eventually caved after months of revisions going back and forth without any significant improvements and submitted the article with all her suggestions. Got it back from the reviewers saying that the english and general style of writing was horrible. 

 

I do not ever want to go through this again. First, I was ashamed to read the reviewers comments, and second I will waste months on every manuscript if this continues. My second promoter seems convinced that I can't write because I keep rejecting her "suggestions", but really they are just crap. I enrolled for a writing course just so that I can write my next article without having to take suggestions from anyone but the teachers, even though I already took a similar course during my master's.

 

How do I open the conversation on this without hurting anyone? 

Edited August 26, 2013 by igfy

[TakeruK]

Wow, this is a tough situation. Firstly, are you certain that it is her suggestions that caused the reviewer to comment on the writing? The example you gave does not show any errors. You said that there are suggestions that contain grammatical errors and unclear language. If so, then you should be able to explain these errors to her when you make your changes. That is, each week, when you get your suggestions/notes, you should respond to each individual note. When writing my MSc thesis, my advisor gave notes in ink so I just stuck a post-it note on each change I wanted to discuss further and wrote down the reason why I did not completely implement the suggested change. I brought these notes in to the next meeting and discussed them with my advisor until we came to a phrasing that we both agreed on.

 

So, maybe doing something like this in the future would be a helpful way to bring up the topic professionally? If there is a technical mistake (i.e. grammar or spelling) then you should be able to dispute her suggestion without any problems -- maybe an English writing handbook might help too. If it's words like "aim" vs. "goal" then there really isn't a difference and you could either use her words or try to convince her that your words are just as good. But this synonym issue would be secondary to any actual writing errors!

 

You already said that you talked to her about this issue but it didn't work. If you talk to her again, with the reviewer's comments in hand, do you think she will agree with you this time, or at least come to some sort of compromise? Or, you say that she is your "second" promoter, do you have other people involved in this project? Sometimes getting another person, especially another prof, involved could help you in disagreements between you and your advisor. But you should be careful that you don't make it appear as if you are getting other people to "gang up" on your advisor, or that you don't appear to be "going over their head". If you do this, I would recommend that you do it with permission from your advisor if possible -- for example, perhaps try saying that you are both wasting time arguing back and forth over the writing details and ask if you can solicit the opinion of a third person, or something like that. 

[Eigen]

Are you the only two authors on the paper?

 

If not, you should go to one of the other, hopefully more senior, authors to see if they can help you. 

 

If you're the only two on the paper, and the same will be true for future works, then you're kind of stuck. It can really suck to be in this situation, but if they are the "senior" author, then you really have to in large part go with their revisions, or back out of writing the paper. 

 

You can definitely comment on those you don't change for specific reasons, or go and sit down with her and go over the wordings and why you think yours are the better way to go. But at the end of the day, if you can't convince her, you don't have a lot you can really do about it. 

 

This isn't just a problem with a power imbalance in co-authors, I've seen collaborations stall out over writing issues. At the end of the day, everyone that's an author on the paper has to agree on the final version to submit- if you can't, the paper just doesn't get submitted. 

 

Your other option is to find someone else, another professor, to work and write with. 

[danieleWrites]

I don't have any substantial suggestions to add, TakeruK and Eigen have some great ideas. However, I teach composition classes and you may potentially be running into a problem that people who teach or tutor composition run into. Giving suggestions on a paper or grading a paper is a lot more subjective than people feel comfortable with. In a math problem, if the student's result is different than the answer key's, the student is clearly wrong in a decisively supportable way that can't be argued with. If you have one apple in a basket and add another apple to the basket, the basket will have two apples, and there's not argument. In a paper, that's not so, particularly when working with complex ideas the way scholars do. It's particularly difficult if the scholar is competent and the ideas are exciting and fresh. She may be focusing on the style not the ideas (which you would prefer) because basic editing---fixing grammar, spelling, and word choice---is comfortable whereas fixing issues in the ideas and logic is more difficult. Editing should be the final part of the revision process, not the only part a co-author focuses on.

 

People who teach or tutor writing have bad days and do nothing but focus on editing because it's easy. I've had students come from the writing center with nothing but marks about grammar issues, but nothing about how the paper was missing a central idea or there was not logic in the thing at all. I tell my students to always be specific with what they want help with when taking their work to someone for a look over, even their teachers. Your co-author may be focusing on the editing because she doesn't know how to offer anything to the bigger issues of structure, logic, and development, particularly if she's not confident enough in her fluency. There's an idea that a "correct" English exists; this idea of "correct" brings in a false binary in logic, that it's all about correct and incorrect when it's actually about supporting and developing the central idea. For you, that would be supporting your conclusions about the hypothesis and your process for arriving at those conclusions. This is an argument, which is less objective than fixing a spelling mistake. If she can't "fix" or make suggestions for the argument, she can "fix" the language. Believe it or not, this is a very, very common problem in writing. And it's a manageable problem. You just have to know how to revise, and how to help, um, train someone else to revise.

 

I would suggest that you take a top down approach. Write the paper and send it to her with very specific things for her to focus on. Start with the larger, global issues. Is the paper focused? Are the ideas developed logically? Are you missing any major things, like critical literature, methodology, and so on. Are you ordering your points in the strongest way (conclusion before methodology?)? Are the conclusions you've drawn about the study what she agrees with? Are you missing any? Have too many? Does she approve the structure of the paper? That kind of thing. If/when she sends back stuff with language edits in them ignore the edits. You can tell her that you're focusing on making sure the global issues work first and that you'll both focus on language at the end. In this way, you're training her (and yourself) to work together to produce a solid paper, and you're training both of you to think of the paper in holistic manner, rather than a series of grammatical corrections. If she insists, you can explain that you agree that language is very important, but the paper will go through revisions and re-writing sentences that may end up deleted or placed in different parts of the paper is a waste of time at this stage. Don't even look at her grammatical edits at this point, just work from your copy.

 

Once you both agree on the global issues and structure, move to the medium level stuff, like evidence, where charts should be located, paragraph level logic. Be very specific about the feedback you're looking for. Let her know that you worked with her global suggestions from your original copy and her language edits aren't in it because you want to make sure there aren't larger issues to deal with first. If she objects, explain that you will both work on revising the style when you've got the paper itself finished. This will help you discuss the meat of the paper because you're both working within the same boundaries.

 

The real problem will crop up when it is time to revise for style. Once you're ready to do that, take it to someone else first. Universities have writing centers, though I imagine in the Netherlands it's not one that staffs English writers. Take it to the people who teach English writing courses, or find out if they have tutors that you can use for this purpose. Maybe find a native English speaker attending the university, particularly one in a similar discipline, for a look see. Get someone else to help you with the first draft of editing for style, not just for their help, but so that you can have a more authoritative source to defend your style choices to your co-author. Don't use your English reviewer as a mediator, but rather the way you would use another researcher's work to develop your own. We scholars stand on the shoulders of giants. For example: if you want to call something blue and your co-author prefers to use cerulean, you now have some back up when you explain that blue is more appropriate because, unless such specificity is required to differentiate between different instances of blue, it's an English convention to use clearer language, and you know this because John, your English writing professor that agreed to look the paper over for style, said as much about a few word choices and referred you to a book called Strunk & White. When you send her the draft specifically to have her look at it for style (and final approval to submit for publication), you can mention that you've already had your English writing person look it over because you've been told that previous papers you've worked on together have horrible English. Be prepared to compromise on some things because you are a co-author.

 

This is the process I teach to my composition students when they have to collaborate. It's also the revision process I teach to my students for every paper they write. It makes no sense to fix sentence-level problems when you might have to delete, move, or add sentences, and then have to revise the sentences all over again. It's kind of like writing the perfect conclusion paragraph when you don't yet know what the paper is going to argue.

[Eigen]

Part of the issue may also be a difference in how you're writing. 

 

I read the OP as talking about a co-author, where the co-author is re-writing as they go through the paper, rather than revising a students work. 

 

It's a subtle difference, but it completely changes the dynamic. They aren't revising a student's work, but editing a paper that they are a co-author on. I could be wrong on this, however. 

 

For most people, that strongly effects the style from the early stages- it means the co-author is going through the paper and setting up how they would phrase things, likely based on the rest of the paper. From co-writing, it's a definite challenge to write in parallel with another author when the two have very different writing styles, which is what it seems like is happening here. Both authors are focussing on stylistic differences, because I imagine the "ideas" of the paper (being as this is in Epi) are more set from the research. 

[danieleWrites]

I read it the same way. I understood that the OP was doing the bulk of the writing and sending it to the co-author for revision and approval, but the only feedback he was getting was in the form of edits that made the paper worse, which is not was he was looking for. I understood that there was a break-down in communication when it came to the edits.

 

Collaboration can be managed by setting boundaries. If he is the person doing the bulk of the writing, he is in a position to set specific boundaries that would benefit them both. I may not have done any epidemiology, but I have written collaborative papers in sociology which, like epi, is a statistical science. The up shot is that there is a convention for laying out a paper, but there can be disagreement on how ideas are organized, for example, if other research is mentioned, what order it should be mentioned in or how it relates to the tested hypothesis. I use the word ideas because I don't want to make any assumptions about his work. Like science, revision benefits from a logical process. Unlike science, the process doesn't have to be in any particular order, but it can be managed.

[igfy]

Thank you for your advice. There are some things I will certainly try.

 

Your assumptions are right. I'm the one that designs  the research, does the analysis and writes the paper. When I ask for advice during the data-preparation or analysis phase, both my professor as my second promotor are very helpful. However, when I'm in the writing phase, it seems I'm only slowed down by my second promotor. My professor says he doesn't have time to check my manuscripts, so he mainly comments on the tone and content of the manuscript, which is great. However he doesn't want to get involved in any differences we have when it comes to writing. 

 

 My fiance is a native english speaker and sometimes I check some  text with him. He agrees with me on the grammatical errors my second promotor made, although I'm still also still learning a lot from him. When I'm writing I always have a dictionary and thesaurus close by and I always check every word or sentence I'm unsure about. Although my sentences are not always as smooth as those of a native speaker, I'm pretty sure they are at least correct. 

 

Basically the problem breaks down to two smaller problems. The first is style, the second is grammar.

 

I spend a lot of time making sure that my manuscript is easy to read, doesn't repeat the same words over and over again, and keeps the reader interested. My co-author has a different writing style and tries to force this onto me by for instance replacing words with their synonyms. She also swears by this fixed structure of the text, which I have never seen in any article or writing course. She tries molding my manuscript into this structure, she herself uses for all her articles. I guess you can say that this is a matter of taste. I prefer texts in which arguments are ordered so they are easy to read, she prefers a fixed structure. I prefer some variation in my words, while she likes to use the same words over and over again to keep things simple. 

 

The second issue is the grammar thing. Here, she is mostly wrong. For intance she often makes mistakes on the verbs. When I write "Many European countries are faced with..", she corrected this with "Many European countries are being facing". 

 

I guess I could indeed solve the grammar issue, by explaining why I don't use her suggestions, until she gets the point. However, the style issue is something completely different. On the one hand, the articles will be in my thesis, so I feel they should be written in a way that I prefer. Of course I look at other articles to discern the common style of writing in the field, so it's never exactly in a way that I would prefer. On the other hand, I would like to keep my co-authors satisfied. I guess we will both have to compromise on style...

[TakeruK]

I guess I could indeed solve the grammar issue, by explaining why I don't use her suggestions, until she gets the point. However, the style issue is something completely different. On the one hand, the articles will be in my thesis, so I feel they should be written in a way that I prefer. Of course I look at other articles to discern the common style of writing in the field, so it's never exactly in a way that I would prefer. On the other hand, I would like to keep my co-authors satisfied. I guess we will both have to compromise on style...

 

For style, I think what Eigen said above is correct -- your second promoter is going to be a co-author too, so the article has to also be written in a way that she is okay with/prefers. In academic writing, I think that all the authors must be satisfied with the final product, and it would be unethical for any of the authors, including the first author, to submit an article without permission/input from every co-author. Just because they will be in your thesis does not mean that everything will sound the way you want it. 

 

Hopefully you can find some compromise that makes you both happy. I've seen cases where some co-authors completely disagree on the writing. The person did not like the writing at all so they removed themselves from the author list. This person was an accomplished scientist though, so having one less paper coauthored was no big deal to them. If your second promoter does not compromise, that is really your only option, since you can't write the paper without them. However, I think that might do you more harm than good, since you are probably not as well established to be able to do things like that. 

 

Finally, in my field, I know that very few first papers written by students are actually submitted the way the student has written them. After the many many revisions, many of us find that the majority of the paragraphs have been completely changed from our original writing. This is normal, and I think it's good. It's the process of editing and revising! I also think it's normal for papers by students to start out with the writing tone/style of their supervisors and then eventually mature and evolve into the student's own style.