Congratulations! You opened your email to a message of revise and resubmit. This is an excellent response for your submitted manuscript. Articles rarely get accepted without revisions and desk rejection rates are high. A revise and resubmit means the editor and reviewers see promise in your work (no matter how snarky Reviewer 2 might sound!).
Short story: I had a colleague in a workshop who offered generous feedback on my work. At the end of each workshop, they’d hand me a draft with all sorts of comments, questions, suggestions, and recommendations for future reading. There would also be grammar corrections throughout the document. For some reason, this copyediting infuriated me.
In the last post, we talked about the emotions you might feel when reading over reviewer’s comments and how to get organized to start revising. In this post, I’ll discuss how to start revising, from developing a plan to beginning to write. There are several questions you should consider before beginning work on your article revisions.
A revise and resubmit is no joke. It may be the piece of writing that begets the most procrastination and anxiety. I think this is because you are not writing just for yourself and an imagined audience, but rather for a real audience of readers who just offered you a critique that was at times
Imagine this: you’re diligently working on a draft of a manuscript when you reach a section that would benefit from a bit more research. Perhaps you need to cite a few more authors to support your point, or you just need some background literature to provide additional context. You go to find the
In an earlier post, I discussed how academic writers often end up giving short thrift to the revision process – at their own peril, I might add. Today I’m going to focus on why academic writers are hesitant to revise. Our frustration with the revision process doesn’t only happen after the first draft. It
There is a lot of advice in the blogosphere about how to overcome resistance to writing. Much of that advice comes in the form of “get something down on paper, and the revising will come later” or “editing is easier than writing.” Revising is treated as an afterthought or, alternatively, as a process that
It’s hard to convince yourself that it’s time to send your manuscript out. Beyond the checklist of making sure you’ve done all the tasks associated with your writing, there is the matter of “feeling” as if you’re done. This feeling can be elusive. You’ll always think there is one more sentence you can rewrite,
Writing an introduction well is one of the most important skills an academic writer can have. Most academic readers have a limited amount of time to consume a wealth of information. In order to make it through vast amounts of literature, they skim. This matters to you as an academic writer because you must write
How many times have you finished a manuscript, ran your word processing software’s spell-check function, and crossed your fingers that all the grammar mistakes have been corrected? You’re mentally drained by the time you complete a manuscript, and the last thing you want to think about is taking another pass at your work – you don’t