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20.1 What’s the buzz?

At http://shitmyreviewerssay.tumblr.com/ researchers can leave the negative com-
ments made by reviewers of their papers. Some reviewers can be very insulting (see

the factoids to Chapter 11 Writing a Peer Review and Section 11.10 in English for
Academic Correspondence ). For example:
It is clear that this manuscript will not win a beauty contest. There are still many awkward
sentences that make me feel like listening to someone that scratches a glass plate with an
iron nail.

The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of
me, is the terrible writing style.

However many are probably very true.

(1) Below are samples of reviews taken from the website. Read them all, and then try

to put them into categories (e.g. unclear aim of research, poor vocabulary). For your
future work, remember these comments – they may apply to your own manuscripts
too!

1. I’m sorry, but I’m reading this thinking, we’ve already heard about that, you’re telling us
again and now you’re telling me I’m going to hear about it again in the next chapter.

2. Considering by the end of the paper I had no idea what was being said, I don’t believe
the paper was successful in its argument. In fact, it felt like the author was merely saying
the same thing over and over again but with synonyms.
3. I could not find any passage in the MS that would explain to me what is the exact novel

idea, proposal, argument or hypothesis.
4. The interchangeable use of evaluate and validate is a concern because it is not clear if
authors know the difference between these two verbs.
5. There are not enough headings.

6. I counted 15 uses of ‘clear’ or ‘clearly.’ That’s one per page. ‘Clearly’ the results aren’t

as clear as the author would like them to be.

7. The authors presents a flurry of statistics, but they do not explain why or how those are
relevant to the study.

8. It is not clear what the author wants to accomplish.

9. Overall, this paper goes to significant amounts of trouble to accomplish something that
is already well established as a technique in a less elegant manner than is currently
employed. This paper should not be published.

10. The paper brings to mind the Mark Twain quote: ‘I didn’t have time to write a short let-

ter, so I wrote a long one instead.’
11. The paper is grossly over referenced, and reads a little like a student trying to impress a
supervisor that a lot has been read, rather than a mature and parsimonious use of cita-
tions. The conclusions are hardly world shattering.

12. It was agonizing for this reviewer to read a total of nine pages describing the overall

methods.