Colleague blames me for not spotting typos when I only reviewed the structure and content

Question

I am a graduate student (PhD) in a STEM program. A fellow lab mate of mine asked me to review a chapter (basically the background/history of their project) of their graduate thesis a couple months ago. It was during my finals, I had conference papers due, along with the pandemic shutting everything down; it was a crazy time. I informed this person I was really busy, but I would try. They sent it to me (in PDF format), and I read through it and made some suggestions on content, ideas, and presentation. It was in rough shape; there was a lot of work to be done, but their main concern was if the content made sense and had good logic flow. I replied with my opinions. This was a favor from me without compensation. The thesis was in English and the lab mate was a native speaker.

Fast forward to now, this person defended their thesis this week and passed. Yesterday I received a very passive aggressive text message from this person that stated the following (mostly paraphrasing):

The only real critique I had on my thesis was that the chapter I sent you had typos. I went through this chapter again and found quite a few. In the future when someone asks you to review a chapter you need to carefully check and find typos because it’s embarrassing to send a final thesis with a chapter filled with typos. Its disappointing when you rely on someone and they screw you I hope in the future you do a better job.

The rest of the text chain did not go well.

Let me start off by admitting that I am able to see my fault in this. I could’ve (should’ve) done a more thorough job in editing. But my question is: Is it really my responsibility to find typos? It’s always been my view that you polish something as much as you can before sending it off to others. They sent it in a PDF which I can’t edit (also no indication of spelling mistakes, and its so easy to gloss over mistakes), and I informed them I was super busy, both excuses, but still a little relevant. I also was dumbfounded that they didn’t do a single edit after mine. I feel ultimately it is their graduate thesis and their responsibility for its contents. I feel I can’t be blamed for this person literally not pressing the spell-check button.

In hindsight I should’ve been more assertive with this person by saying I didn’t have enough time to fully give myself to editing. This is a lesson I’ve learned. They are now removing me from their acknowledgements (I couldn’t care less), but what I do care about are the things they are telling other people about me (I screwed them; I’m lazy; etc.). I replied to their texts expressing my view that the typos are not my fault, and it quickly turned into a blow out where I just ended up apologizing and asking not to discuss it further.

What could I have done better? What should I do now? Am I justified in my opinions?

PS: Thank you all for your responses and encouragements. I was feeling pretty bad about the situation, but I feel a little vindicated now. I’ve learned a lesson: I will focus on clear communication and setting expectations.

Answer 1

"The only real critique I had on my thesis was that the chapter I sent you had typos. I went through this chapter again and found quite a few. In the future when someone asks you to review a chapter you need to carefully check and find typos because it's embarrassing to send a final thesis with a chapter filled with typos. Its disappointing when you rely on someone and they screw you I hope in the future you do a better job."

This is unfair. What happened was, at best, a miscommunication on their part. They somehow thought you would check thoroughly for typos, which you did not have time to do. Unless you told them "this chapter is perfect and doesn't need more editing", I have trouble imagining why they would assume the chapter was camera-ready.

Let me start off by admitting that I am able to see my fault in this. I could've (should've) done a more thorough job in editing.

I don't see that as a flaw. If anything, perhaps you could have communicated more clearly about what you were able to do, as well as what you did not do (thoroughly check for typos).

I feel ultimately it is their graduate thesis and their responsibility for its contents.

Exactly right, and this is truly the "bottom line" here. No one else is responsible for the content of your thesis but yourself. Getting help does not absolve you of the responsibility to proofread your own document and when you defend, you are supposed take full ownership over what is written.

what I do care about are the things they are telling other people about me (ie I screwed them, I'm lazy, etc).

The word for this is "bullying". This behavior is not acceptable and should not be tolerated by you or anyone else.

Answer 2

You don't owe this person anything, were under no obligation to help them, and everything you do for them is done in a spirit of generosity and kindness. If they don't think you did a good enough job, that's their problem, not yours. If they don't want your help, they are under no obligation to ask for it.

It sounds to me that you did it exactly right, concentrated on the what the most important thing to improve was a the time - a poor structured and argued thesis might fail. One with typos is unlikely to.

Believe me, if this person is going round bad mouthing you to others, the only person it is going to reflect badly on is them.

Answer 3

That student's response is obviously unnaceptable and quite rude. You should gently remind the student that ultimately they are responsible for their own work when they submit a document and if editing was so important to him/her next time they should hire an editor.

That being said, in the future it's a nice gesture to let others know ahead of time if you only looked at grammar or logic so they know what still needs looking over.

Answer 4

Once as an undergraduate I gave a professor a draft of a scholarship essay for review. I told the professor that it was a rough draft but that the main idea was there and that I'd appreciate feedback on the main ideas in the essay. When I got the review back, the professor was furious and proceeded to chew me out. I had wasted their time by giving them a draft with typos and mistakes which were obvious and could have been fixed with a good spellchecking and simple grammar review. Typos are a job for the spellchecker, not a tenured and revered faculty member. While I quickly developed an opinion that the professor was in fact not a very nice person, I think that they were right in some sense and ever since I've always made it a point to not send out drafts with obvious typos that are simple to fix, even if it's easy to say "sorry, rough draft, there may be some typos".

I share this because it sounds like almost the exact opposite situation from what you describe. While it's a good idea not to be a jerk about it, IMO it's extraordinarily rude for someone else to expect you to find typos in their own writing unless you are to be a coauthor on the work. I don't think you're responsible for the typos in the slightest.

Good communication is always challenging and it's hard to properly judge how you did there from the vague descriptions of text messages that blew up. It's also important to maintain good relations with your coworkers, so it might be worth re-examining how you engaged with them on the issue after your own feelings about it have settled down a bit. Perhaps you could have worded your response differently, started by congratulating them on passing to try to lighten the mood, etc, but this is more of a personal skill than anything. For what it's worth, if person X complained to me that friend Y failed to find typo's in person X's thesis, I'd think much less of person X more than anything - gossiping and trashing your coworkers like that is not ok.

Answer 5

This lab mate should take full responsibility for the contents of their own graduate thesis. Having a friend or colleague look over a chapter is fine, but it does not relieve the main author from that responsibility. The email that this person sent to you is unacceptable, and you should not feel bad.

Answer 6

"(...) Its disappointing when you rely on someone and they screw you I hope in the future you do a better job"
The rest of the text chain did not go well.

Oh man, I had to take a walk to cool down. I truly (and seriously) admire all the answers you got here and that none of them told you to reply to this guy to fuck off.

I've learned a lesson: I will focus on clear communication and setting expectations.

This is a good lesson to learn anyway, but do not expect that kind of person to have been grateful for the work you did. Whatever critique of their work they would have received would have been your fault anyway.

Good work in keeping your emotions at bay.

Answer 7

I've been in similar situations, and I've learned that people have different ideas of what "editing" or "looking over" means. If that happens, I am sure to be absolutely certain what the person is expecting, and what I will offer. I don't think you are to blame in this situation; use it as a learning experience and be sure to clarify the level of "proofreading" requested in the future.

Answer 8

I often review papers for a certain college student, and always explicitly ask if they're looking for deep technical review of their writing - typos, punctuation, word choice, verb tenses - or more of a broad overview of the content (need more explanation here, rework this example, you haven't defined this term yet). And in any event - unless you edited & submitted it on their behalf, any errors still present when they submitted the paper were their responsibility, not yours.

Answer 9

Others have already elaborated that you did not do anything wrong, and I have nothing to add to this. I will only address your other two subquestions:

What could I have done better?

While setting expectations could have prevented the entire affair (not that it was justified), there is another strategy. I review a lot of stuff for colleagues, students, journals, and so on, but I do not set any expectations beforehand. Instead, I review on every level (broad structure to typos) by default, in particular for students, as they benefit from certain issues pointed out early on.

However, I will remark every systematic error only once or twice. For example, if field names are inappropriately capitalised throughout the manuscript, I will only mark the first one or two occurrences. If not obvious, I will accompany this with a warning that I will stop marking this kind of error. In particular, I will not correct more than a handful of typos (of the kind that can be found by spell checkers), but simply remark:

colleauge → colleague (I will stop marking spell-checkable typos from now on)

I think this is a win–win situation: I do not need to proactively set expectations, I do not spend much unnecessary work, every sane person knows what they are up to, and in case I ever review for somebody as ethically challenged as your colleague, I have a solid defence.

I just ended up apologizing

This may depend a bit on your culture, but this sounds like a counterproductive move that will just enable your colleague. (“Fractalflame apologised; so they admit I am right …”)

What should I do now?

As others have mentioned before me, your colleague is probably rather making a fool of themselves than you. Still, remember that the entire thing is on print so you have rock-solid proof, should your colleague ever challenge your version of the story. Just memorise a few typos that a spell-checker could have found and that made it to the final thesis. In case this ever comes up in a way that requires you addressing this, you can cite them as evidence that your colleague obviously hadn’t run a spell-checker yet, and you didn’t want to rub that in.

Answer 10

Let me start off by admitting that I am able to see my fault in this.

No.
Don't let your labmate shift the blame to you from himself. In all honestness, you made no error and there's no fault on your part. You did a voluntary review of a text he was responsible of, nothing more. It feels he is coping with the critique by finding someone to blame instead of accepting his faults.

Let me introduce my thoughts by a proposed reply, highlighting the core ideas:

Dear Lab Mate,

I received your letter and I'm glad to hear about your successful defense. I feel, however, surprised by your assertion of my responsibility regarding the typos.

When you kindly asked me to review your thesis, I was deeply occupied, as I mentioned in my reply. Nevertheless, I agreed to spend whatever little free time I could find with helping. I thoroughly read your thesis, and I made a number of comments I wholeheartedly believe were helpful. Assuming you already used a language checking tool, and given my restricted time I could spend with reading, I focused on the context and the structure of your thesis - as I mentioned in my reply - instead of spelling and grammar.

Reading your email, I was surprised that you believe I was in some way responsible for the typos in your final work, and at the same time, I am a bit disappointed to see that none of my suggestions were considered. This makes me believe there was a communication error regarding your expectations, and perhaps we should've make this more clear.

Though I was glad to help you, I believe the author of the thesis bears full responsibility for the context, and I did provide genuine help - whether accepted or not. What I saw was an intermediate version, and a final review should've been made by you, your supervisor, and possibly e.g. a spell checker tool, to filter out such errors as well. As I mentioned in my review, there were places seemingly unfinished, and I also suggested some major structural changes.

I'm sorry to hear that my voluntary help did not meet your expectations, but please note that I was in no way obliged to aid your work, and though I did everything in my limited options to improve your thesis, it's the writer who should finalize the content and decide whether it may be submitted. In the future, I would suggest communicating your expectations more clearly, and also leave enough time for reviewing your work in detail, instead of solely relying on other's voluntary help [note: and then shifting the blame on them] , to avoid such situations.

Thanks, and I wish good luck for the followings:

Fractal Flame

Answer 11

You're in the right, but don't continue the flame war

The person who requested the review from you appears to be either mentally unstable (e.g. a wound collector; see: psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spycatcher/201509/wound-collectors) or extremely manipulative. Either way try not to inflame the situation anymore than it already is, silently cut your ties with this person, and move on. You now know this is not someone to work with or interact with in any way in the future. They're either going to mistreat you, or are potentially dangerous. You did nothing wrong, but it's time to walk away. If needed get professional advice on next steps. But whatever you do, don't continue the flame war (even though you're in the right), and be very very careful about any further interactions with this person. They may well be harmless, but their behavior is really weird, suggesting they might have a serious (and dangerous) mental illness (note: I am a layperson and not part of any medical profession; if concerned get advice from a professional).

Even if the student might be acting in good faith, just walk away

The third possibility I could see is that the student in question is extremely entitled, so they expect others to do things for them, and feel justified in chewing you out when you don't meet "expectations". In this case the student is being unintentionally rude. The problem is none of us answering over the Internet can judge which of the three is the case. You'll have to assess the situation and make that judgement call, and react accordingly. Which in my opinion, the best response in all three cases is to walk away. Nothing is gained, and poking the bear could be dangerous.

Answer 12

Your colleague wrote "I went through this chapter again and found quite a few [typos] ... "

I would suggest to your "colleague" (who isn't acting very collegial) that it was clearly their responsibility to go through their chapters themselves prior to submitting their thesis. In addition to coming across as rude, they come across as inexcusably lazy.

Answer 13

There is an old joke that goes like this:

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He spots a man down below and lowers the balloon to shout: “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man below says: “Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude.”

“You must be an engineer” says the balloonist.

“I am” replies the man. “How did you know.”

“Well” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.”

The man below says “You must be a manager.”

“I am” replies the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problems. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault.”

Long story short, some people just have a strong need to blame anyone but themselves for mistakes.