Worth reading.

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“Is it normal,” he asked in a small voice, “to feel stupid after getting an edited manuscript back?”

I laughed, but I knew this wasn’t funny. He was embarrassed by the mistakes he had made, the sentences that weren’t perfect, the fact that I had seen him in the intellectual equivalent of his undies. Somehow it had been easier for him to have his ideas battered generally than to have specific mistakes in prose highlighted.

So I launched into a monologue about how we all feel stupid most of the time, especially after getting our manuscripts back. And he was lucky, I noted, that he still had me to point out all this stuff while he could make changes and learn from his mistakes. After graduate school, it gets hard to find someone to pay so much attention to your writing.

via Shame in Academic Writing – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education.