[PRL] Fwd: TP Msg. #754 On Journal Rejection

[Mitchell Wand]

Perhaps some useful thoughts in here.  --Mitch

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
Date: Oct 30, 2006 9:54 PM
Subject: TP Msg. #754 On Journal Rejection
To: tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu



Reminder: You can comment on this or any past posting by going to:
http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/

                ----------------------------------------------------------
"The best advice I ever got came at a seminar on publishing--the
scholar told us that when we were ready to send out an article, make
out three different envelopes to three different journals. Send it to
the first--if it gets rejected, then send it to the second. If it gets
rejected again, send it to the third... His point was that the whole
process is so subjective that you need to give your work the benefit
of the doubt a few times before pulling the plug on it (or putting it
in a drawer indefinitely).

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the handling of rejection and failure in
the writing/publishing process.  It is from a free on-line monthly
newsletter, Flourish, for scholarly writers available at:
http://www.wendybelcher.com/pages/FlourishNewsletter.html , edited by
author Wendy Belcher [www.wendybelcher.com].  April 2006, vol. 2, no.
4. Flourish encourages and connects graduate student, faculty, and
independent scholarly writers in the social sciences and humanities.
Copyright (c) 2005. Wendy Belcher. All rights reserved. Reprinted with
permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT:  The Balancing Act

                                Tomorrow's Research

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                                 On Journal Rejection

Rejection is the worst. Even though none of us believe that we are
great writers, getting an article returned from a journal always feels
like a direct blow to the chest. And yet, rejection is the common
experience of both the great and the terrible. You are never more of a
writer than at that moment when your hard work has been returned with
a curt word or devastating dismissal. Like most things in life, you
can't fail if you haven't tried. This month, two readers wrote in
about the business of handling rejection and failure. I'm always
interested in hearing readers' thoughts and experiences.

Rejection Lines

Some words of wisdom and comfort from a faculty member in literature.
"I'm sorry to hear about the experience with the journal. I've had
that happen to me---I've seen some of the most inexplicable (and
sometimes careless or rude) reader's reports. Once I had an article
rejected in three days! (With the glacial pace of peer review in the
world of academic publishing, this must be some kind of record.) The
editor told me that it was so bad that he wasn't even going to send it
on to his readers. Well, I didn't change it at all, and send it to
another [better] journal and they accepted it without any revisions
(and it was published last year.) Go figure. I just thought that it
was a good piece---that editor did shake my confidence a bit, but I
just decided to keep believing in the piece.

"The best advice I ever got came at a seminar on publishing--the
scholar told us that when we were ready to send out an article, make
out three different envelopes to three different journals. Send it to
the first--if it gets rejected, then send it to the second. If it gets
rejected again, send it to the third... His point was that the whole
process is so subjective that you need to give your work the benefit
of the doubt a few times before pulling the plug on it (or putting it
in a drawer indefinitely). I basically follow this process, unless I
find something in a reader's report that is so compelling that it
makes me revise a bit. But, I always try to get it back out ASAP.

"I too feel like I have a terrible time finding the right journals for
my work, and this is half the battle. I'm not theoretical enough for
some journals; too theoretical for others (one report complained that
I cited Edward Said, for example). And when my work is on really
obscure materials, it adds additional complications. I often get
reports where the person clearly doesn't know much about the material.
It is sometimes hard to find good readers for your work, who, even if
they don't accept the work, can offer good revision suggestions.
Aargh! It is frustrating, but I hope that you send that work back out
a few more times! I've been told that PMLA is a great place to send
work---they don't accept a lot of articles, but they always find good
readers and give suggestions."

Accepting Failure

Reader: After a fairly successful graduate school career, I just got
my first tenure-track job. I need to write, but I find that I don't
know how. There is something wrong and I can't figure out what. So I
get anxious and don't do it. (My dissertation was ambitious but
sucked.) I am hoping that information might alleviate the anxiety and
I can be more productive. Do you have any thoughts?

Wendy: I can certainly understand the anxiety. I think graduate
students are caught between the ideal world where all graduate
students receive mentoring and the real world where busy professors
have little time to instruct graduate students in the brass tacks of
writing articles and books. Students think it is just them, but it
isn't. It's a general problem in graduate education. So, you are not
weird or alone. Fortunately, you don't always need a human being,
there are a lot of helpful books out there, some listed at my website.
I can highly recommend any book by Robert Boice. Be of good courage!

Reader (one month later): Just wanted to drop you a note about how
things are going. I have been rethinking the writing process and the
Boice has been very helpful. Writing daily is important and writing in
small increments even more so. And, I finally understand that, at
least for me, I need to rewrite! I had never gone through the full
editing process before, and it has helped me to see that Š brilliance
is work. The fear of stupidity that many people, and I think
especially women, struggle with comes from the immediate sensation of
failure that drafting induces, the failure to be brilliant from the
get-go. I think you need an experience when writing happens gradually
to realize that most, if not all, can write and write well.
News from the Editor

I've been working on a revise and resubmit notice from a journal. It
is always difficult to get my head back inside an article that I
haven't worked on for a while, but fortunately I had really good
recommendations from the reviewers. I haven't taken all of their
advice, but seeing the article from their perspective helped to
estrange it from my brain. They saw as unclear parts that I had
thought were perfectly clear, but on revisiting those parts with their
comments in hand I saw that the reviewers were right: I hadn't been
clear. Such recommendations make the peer review process seem like a
great invention.

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