Knowledge construction at graduate level discursively engages writers in building the connection between disciplinary literature and their authority of individual creation. Existing research often sees this construction as social and dialogic and has widely examined its rhetorical and interactional features within its disciplinary local contexts. However, little attention seems to be drawn to the interplay between the expected presentation of knowledge and students' actual knowledge-making. Through detailed discourse and intertextual analyses, this study explores supervisory orientations offered through written feedback and their impact on two L2 students' restructuring of knowledge in their master's theses. Findings reveal these students' incorporation of justifiable, interpretive and intertextually pertinent knowledge as concrete responses to these orientations. The ways they organized their conceptual and intertextual resources were shaped by explicit supervisory scaffold and how they wished to present a refined self (critical, self-reflexive, credible, socially-grounded) in writing.