This is the first time I’ve submitted a paper to an academic journal and because I wasn’t expecting it to be accepted (pending re-writes), I wasn’t too disheartened to learn that it needed major changes to be publishable. Indeed, I was pretty chuffed that it wasn't flat-out rejected. BUT. I thought I was prepared for the rigorous comments that would be attached to a paper that needs substantial changes. And while many of the suggestions made me feel like Homer Simpson (D’oh! Why did I miss that? I’m an idiot!), comments about my linguistic prowess (or lack of) really did hurt.
There are two things I know about myself: I can make people laugh, and I know how to organise words so that they make sense, and use punctuation marks that clearly direct and signpost the reader. And, as you can see from that last sentence, I know how to use an Oxford comma. Boom!
But if you pair the feeling of stupidity that comes when Reviewer 1 makes you realise you missed out key observations before following up with the suggestion that you read through the paper and look at your use of typography and punctuation’, the result is my first real panic about this whole PhD malarkey. Maybe I’m just not good enough to do a PhD? Have I been kidding myself AND my Supervisors?
After a day away from rewrites, I managed to put my thoughts into a more reasonable, cohesive box. Nobody has or will master the English language. It is, to an extent, subjective. Punctuation has rules, but at the same time it is up to the writer's discretion to place punctuation marks in spaces that help the reader navigate the text. To that end, even reviewers are not perfect human beings.
And ironically, after making comments about my use of English, I would suggest that reviewers go through the AI-generated comments they make in order to amend Americanised spelling such as 'color' and 'skeptical', and delete em dashes.
Anyway, rant over. I was given ten days to make the suggested edits and map them to documentation highlighting the changes I made, noting what these changes were, and where I made them. Apparently it's standard practice to give authors more time to do this, but as I'm new to all of this, I'm working on the assumption 10 days is common. It's hard though - call this the ultimate in 'white whines', but with a full time job, a house and garden to look after, and other parts of my PhD study screaming for attention, an extra week in which to do all of this without feeling like I've only been able to pay lip service to edits would have been much appreciated.
Ah well. At the time of writing the suggested amendments have been made and mapped, so I'm going to submit the paper again and keep my fingers crossed. If nothing else I have a good starting point for a chapter about incidental learning as an unintended consequence in my thesis, so writing this paper hasn't been a complete waste of time. I hope.