How to work with readers’ Reports
Years ago, I learned that people have a tendency to hold their breath when opening their email. This is one of those factoids that will clunk around in my brain for perpetuity.
If that anxious, breath-holding characterizes the simple opening of an inbox, how much worse is the opening of a set of readers’ reports.
Today, I’ll suggest that when an academic writer engages with her readers’ reports, part of the challenge she’s facing is the layering of two very different tasks: one is project management and the other is emotional management.
When I was a wee baby graduate student circulating my first would-be journal article (I want to say I sent the manuscript through the mail!), I received a report from a reader that opened, “This is a very strange essay.”
You see, I still remember it.
Whether or not this was fair or good feedback, the sentence’s stubborn grip on my memory shows the way the project management and emotional management tasks of working with readers’ reports get unhelpfully tangled.
Every time I wanted to look at my article and the suggestions for revision, I would end up traversing a familiar and not particularly useful path of shame and self-doubt.
And so, what I’d like to suggest to new scholars receiving their first readers’ reports is relatively simple: separate these two tasks. They each need their own strategies.
To do so, I recommend that writers extract the information that is useable from the readers’ reports as soon as possible.
If you have a straight reject, you are pulling out ideas for revision that you would like to pursue before submitting the manuscript elsewhere.
If you have a revise and resubmit, you are pulling out revision tasks to execute as well as language you would like to echo in your letter to the editor, which includes supportive information from the readers’ reports as well as areas of concern and suggestions for revision.
You can begin by simply copying and pasting key sentences and phrases into two separate documents: a to-do document and (if appropriate) a draft response memo to the editor.
While you might leave the language as is in the draft response memo document, in your to-do document, translate any particularly loaded or critical language into neutral and actionable tasks. So, instead of leaving “the literature review is thin” in place, you’re going to translate it into: review articles x, y, z and draft two new paragraphs about my relationship to this literature.
The purpose of this exercise is to separate your revision task list from the context of judgment.
Again, you want neutral, achievable items such as: review Smith’s article, revise roadmap section of introduction, write sentences acknowledging relationship to Jones’s theory, add example that demonstrates key concept, expand section three with two new paragraphs, etc.
From here, it’s easy to make a plan for revision: you can plug these clear tasks into your calendar or task system. The work of doing your revisions is now separated from the emotionally fraught context of the initial reader reports, and you needn’t look at them again until you’re ready to resubmit.
Okay, but what about the emotional management?
Ideally, separating the revision tasks in this way will give relief from constantly engaging with the context of judgement (which is not a particularly context from which to generate new writing or ideas).
But when dealing with a particularly challenging report, I’d also suggest bringing in your own trusted reader to help you process things. If you are a graduate student, this is likely your advisor or a trusted committee member. At this career stage, I use my partner or very prolific friends.
What you want is someone who is experienced reading these things to tell you what’s unfair, or unprofessional, or whether there’s a political minefield you may have stumbled into. Processing harsh judgment in this way can diffuse things for you and help push back feelings of shame.
