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On judging one’s own writing

In our September “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I am just getting into the business of writing philosophy, and I would be happy to hear others opinion on judging ones own writing.

I have taken forever to writing my thesis and am still not finished (too many different issues to solve) and I am not feeling good about it. Now I have written two papers. One of these papers has gained considerable praise from one reviewer who called it excellent and important, and my supervisor liked it too; it is in R&R. I am not sure, though, if it can make it for the other reviewers had mixed feelings. I have mixed feelings too. While I am standing behind it firmly in one sense, I also see a lots of caveats, and receiving reviewer feedback, I take that very serious, perhaps a little too much. If the reviewer says it is not stable enough, then a part of me believes him, while the other one is meanwhile proving the reviewer false in every point. The feedback did help me to think through aspects I had not thought through before, which also means that I did not have thought the paper enough before. And if it stands on such shaky grounds, maybe, I then think to myself, it should not be published. Or maybe it should, maybe it helps for discussion, if somebody wishes to discuss it. So what are the standards on that. How firm is your trust in your writing, how firm must it be to be valuable?

The second paper is also out for review. I am even more unsure about that one, but in a different way. I like it, and I think it says something genuinly true and important, but I am not sure, if it is “up to the standards of the discipline” which frighten me sometimes a little. It is very challenging to say something non-trivial, and to say it in a way that is technical enough (but perhaps not too much). I always have a kind of feeling that everything I say is just… made up in some way. Even though I firmly believe it is true (at least most of it, there are parts that may not be truth apt). I guess all that sounds very weird and a little contradictory. So I do not seem to be a very good person to judge my own writing. Or maybe I am and it is just that bad. Or maybe the part of me that is up to truth is right, and maybe it is good or good enough.

So much to these inner ups and downs. Now my question are (i) are others are also experiencing this weird divided mind, and how handle it (ii) can others estimate a papers success from their own feel towards it? Like, if I feel it is trivial, then others feel that too; or if I feel that the method is not fully stabilized, or not standardized, then it will not come through peer review. Can you reliably estimate the chances of a paper before submitting? (iii) Do you feel it is fine if a paper has some unresolved issues, so if you did not think about each eventuality before? Is it fine to use peer review as a part of that thinking process in that case?

Do readers have any helpful insights to share?

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5 responses to “On judging one’s own writing”

  1. Anonymous

    I’d be a bit tempted to say that only long term interaction once the paper is out can true reveal the quality of the paper. Just look at all the prize winning papers in fancy places that had very little uptake.

    But I completely get OPs worry. For the reviewer, try to take the reviewers as people who try to bring the best version of the paper out. They might not be so nice, but I think this strategy works a bit better than being defensive.

    Also know that desk rejections, as some early post here indicated, means very little. Try to find people who will give honest feedback though.

    Reply
  2. David Thorstad

    I try to work backwards from my goal. My goal is to write the best papers that I can and publish them when they are as good as I can make them.

    Instead of asking myself how good my papers are, I ask whether another draft would make the paper better. If it would, I write another draft. When I don’t know how to make the paper better, I submit it if I can stand by it and otherwise shelve it.

    There’s not much more you can do than send out the best work you can produce. We all know someone who does better work than we do and wish we were that person, but we are who we are, and we have to make do with where we are right now.

    Just don’t send out anything that isn’t your best work, or that you really don’t think you can stand by.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    Here’s I guess where I’m at with this stuff.

    1. Unappreciated, unpaid, sometimes angry anonymous reviewers are not the arbiters of whether a paper is good. My best paper (according to everyone I know who has read more than one of my papers) was rejected from almost every journal for which it was an excellent fit. Some of the reviewers had good points; many did not. This is not to say that the review process is a lottery or something like that. I don’t believe that’s true.

    2. Because of (1), the best judge of a paper’s quality is you and your network. Your network can help out with the big moves—whether the paper is worth writing, whether the argument broadly works, whether you’re missing anything important, etc. But only you can make the puzzle pieces fit exactly. So, you should first develop a good taste in philosophy papers by reading widely and noting what you find annoying about other people’s papers. Then you should turn that taste on your own writing, trusting your own judgment about when the paper doesn’t pass the sniff test. One thing I’ve learned: if you get a niggling feeling that something is not quite right in the way the paper fits together, trust that feeling. Go back and fix it.

    3. Your aim should not be to publish papers. Your aim should be to publish good papers. Your peers can tell the difference. Search committees can tell the difference. And these people remember the quality of the paper. The reason “we” care about top journal venues is because these are meant to be a proxy of quality of paper. It’s imperfect (bad sometimes). Publishing in a mid- or low-tier journal is a skill that one can learn. The papers need not be good. They just need to be acceptable enough and to get lucky with the referees. So see (2) for your standard, NOT publishable standards (since those are finnicky at best, simply a game at worst).

    4. As far as feeling like you’re just trying to hit a bunch of “standards” like saying something non-trivial, technical, interesting, etc.: this is just growing pains for learning the standards of a discipline. These are relatively good standards, as long as we understand “technical” to be sufficiently broad to mean “importing technical machinery from related theories, like distinctions, concepts, views”.

    Sounds like you’re doing everything right!

    Reply
  4. Michel

    Confidence will come with time and experience, along with a better ability to judge when what you have is good enough. In the meantime, you have permission to defer in part to the judgements of those around you. Your supervisor’s vote of confidence is important, because they have the experience and have spent a lot of time with your work. You can rest on that judgement. And positive referee reports are rare, while negative and nit-picky reports are common; you can defer to the positive reports, too.

    Don’t spend energy second-guessing whether something is worth publishing. The referees will determine that, and you’re already getting positive feedback. There’s lots out there that doesn’t really need to be published–hell, IMO a recent winner of the Philosopher’s Annual is exactly that sort of paper–but that’s not how publishing works.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    I feel like this all the time. I think it’s important to just get feedback from other people, because there is no real way to accurately judge your own writing from the inside. But some of what they say will resonate and some will not, and it’s important to take some advice and then leave some of it alone. I try to remember that just because someone doesn’t like my work or doesn’t take it seriously doesn’t mean that I’m a bad writer (they might just be a bad reviewer). If you’re too conflicted about something, put away for some time and try not to think about, and then when you revisit it might be clearer what’s going on.

    Reply

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