Sending a thesis chapter to your supervisor — and turning the comments into a second draft
A thesis chapter gets the best feedback when your supervisor knows what you want from this round, can comment without any setup, and gets back a second draft that shows what you did with each point. The first two shorten their part; the third shortens the next round, which is where most of the time on a thesis actually goes.
Before you send: say what stage the chapter is at
Supervisors read a first full draft and a nearly finished chapter in very different ways. Tell them which one this is, and ask for the kind of feedback that stage needs:
- Early draft: Is the argument the right one? Is anything missing that the chapter has to answer? Ask them to ignore wording.
- Full draft: Does each section do what the chapter promises in its first page? Is the method described well enough to repeat?
- Near final: Anything you would object to at the viva? Any claim that needs a citation?
One line at the top of the request is enough. It is also the single biggest lever on whether the comments you get back are ones you can act on.
Make the chapter easy to comment on
Your supervisor reads on a laptop between meetings, or on a phone on the train. A chapter that needs the right software, a login or a format conversion before the first comment gets read later, and commented on less.
Send something that opens anywhere, and keep the list of figures and appendices in the chapter rather than in separate attachments, so their comments land in one place.
When the comments come back
Read all of them once before changing anything, and sort them:
- Agree, and clear: these become edits.
- Agree, but vague: “this section is thin” — turn it into an instruction yourself, or ask.
- Disagree: keep a one-line reason. You will be asked about it, and a reason written now is better than one reconstructed in a meeting.
- Questions: answer them in writing, next to the passage.
The second draft should make it possible for your supervisor to check your response to each point without rereading the chapter. That is what makes round two take an hour instead of a week.
How to do it in MindMax
Send the chapter as a link. With the chapter open as a Markdown document, choose Request review… from the comments panel menu. Put the stage and your question in Ask reviewers to focus on, and send. Your supervisor opens the link in any browser — no account, nothing to install — selects a sentence and comments, asks a question, or suggests the wording they would use.
Their comments land on the chapter. In your comments panel, on the passages they are about, with their name. Tick the ones you agree with and revise from them: the edits come back as tracked changes, grouped, each naming the comment it answers. Accept what is right, reject what is not.
Answer the rest where they asked. Reply to questions in the thread. For a point you will not take, press Decline and write the reason; their page shows that you kept it as is, and why.
Send round two to the same link. Your supervisor sees the new version and can switch to See changes: what moved since last time, next to each of their earlier comments and what you did with it.
For a thesis written in MindMax from the start, the chapter plan is also worth updating with what your supervisor said, so the next chapters do not drift back — see writing a thesis or a book.
Where it gets hard
- The chapter has to be Markdown. A chapter that lives as a Word file cannot be sent for review yet. If your supervisor sends back Word comments, put each point on its passage as your own comment, and revise from those.
- Anyone with the link can read it. A read-only copy of the version you sent is kept on our servers until you withdraw the link, or 30 days after the review ends. Do not send unpublished results further than you would send the file. What is stored.
- It does not replace the meeting. Comments are good at sentences and sections; the conversation about what the thesis is arguing still happens in person.
Request review · Turn feedback into a second draft · Download MindMax