Today, I was watching Neil Gaiman's fiction writing master class, where Gaiman offers advice for how to edit your fiction. A lot of this could just as well apply to non-fiction writing. For example, Gaiman says that your first draft is for your eyes only. If you didn't leave it too late, let the first draft sit for a week and then go back to it. Try to read it like you are reading someone else's work, not too harsh but nevertheless, a disinterested person who might advise you to cut where you might be reluctant to cut.
Once you've done the second draft, the piece might be ready for some other readers to provide comments. I find it useful to find someone to read my work before it goes out for review. By this, I don't just mean to present the work at a conference or a colloquium, but someone who actually reads the piece as it is written. I've had so many talks that worked beautifully as talks, but their energy and persuasiveness just didn't translate on the page and they got rejected over and over. One useful way to solicit a review is to do a swap.
But it's not always possible to find an external reader, and that's when you'll have to rely on referee reports from the journal you submit to.
Some people tell me they find referee reports completely useless and they don't consider at all what the reports say and just send the paper on to the next journal. I find that discomforting, as someone who does a fair (but not enormous) share of refereeing I put a lot of care in my reports. Maybe I am just more lucky with referee reports than many people are. Even referee reports accompanying a reject decision are often useful for me to further improve the paper. For other papers, the reports are indeed useless. Those are typically the reports where the reviewer wants to see the paper go into a direction I just don't see it going.
Anyway, Neil Gaiman helped me realize that even in a seemingly not-useful referee report, there is some valuable knowledge you gain (unless the reviewer was just inept, or inattentive, this sometimes happens, but don't assume it too soon!). Namely, if the reviewer says "this didn't work for me" or "I didn't get it", they are always right. They are always right, because indeed, the assertion depends on the reviewer's reception of the work. If they didn't get it, or it didn't work for them, that's valuable information. A lot of redrafting, or excessive familiarity with the topic, or being neglectful to spell out a line of thought can lead a referee to be puzzled. Thus, a referee who says "I'm puzzled here," is giving you valuable information. That referee is saying that there is something puzzling there (to at least one person). It's something you need to fix.
Obviously, a reviewer might be idiosyncratic but if the report looks otherwise coherent remarks that convey "I didn't get it", "It didn't work for me", or "you need to do more work to establish that p", you need to take this very seriously as an author. Unfortunately, reviewers might be hesitant to tell you that they didn't understand a given line of thought, so look for formulations along those lines, expressing puzzlement and lack of understanding. Read those passages again with a dispassionate mindset, and try to make it clearer.
Gaiman mentions that though the reader is always right if something doesn't work for them, or is unclear, the reader is very often wrong in their advice on how to fix it. In rare cases, the reader has hit upon the right solution, in which case you say "Oh that's a brilliant idea, I'll do that, thank you!" But often they don't. The reader is not as much immersed in the story, its characters, its plotline, as you are, and so their advice is often wrong. Gaiman recommends that you take seriously when a reader flags the story doesn't work for them, or is not understandable, but that you should not necessarily take their advice to heart on how to fix it. Often, completely different solution is better.
It seems to me this often happens with referee reports too. Referees will point out holes in your argument, places where the argument is unclear, places where the argument goes too quick and where they lose the line of thought. But the solution the reader recommends is not always ideal. This is, I think, where the responses to editors are very important. You can there say something to the effect that you thank the reviewer for spotting a problem with your paper, and then explain why you fixed the problem in a different way than the reviewer recommended.
Since we don't want to lose the paper in the revise and resubmission process pushing back like this is somewhat scary, and we are tempted to placate reviewers, to go with their solutions even if we have doubts and thank them for what basically made the paper more complicated but not necessarily better.
I think this is unfortunate. As a reviewer, I try to forestall this by saying something like "The following is advice that the author might include if they think it improves the paper", whereas for big problems I do something like "The following are comments that flag problems with the paper I think the author needs to seriously address, or explain to me why they aren't problems in their response to reviewers."
I've been doing this already for a while and now I think the main reason for doing this is to try to avoid authors to become referee-placaters. After all, they know the topic they write the paper on more than I do (in the few cases they don't, it's almost always a very clear reject decision), and they are in the best position to edit the paper to make it better. It's not my job as a reviewer to be a stealth co-author.
For this reason, I'm sometimes tempted to write "The first two full paragraphs on p. 22 are just not working. I'm not entirely sure what point the author is trying to make here," Maybe I don't write things like this, because of some internalized impostor-syndrome that is inherent to reviewing, but I think from now on, I might include something vague like this as it may be useful information for the author.
I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on this, especially since now I do more editing and monograph writing than writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. Would something vague like this be helpful, or off-putting?
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