academic prose

I’m working on revising an article I submitted to an academic journal. First, may I say how I detest having to publish work in academic journals. Academic writing is almost always wooden and generally incomprehensible. A very few academics manage to bridge the gap from their world to the real world – folks like Neil Postman and Barbara Tuchman. Their writing is engaging and interesting. But most academic writing is like the article a colleague showed me some years ago. He’s known in his field and at my shop he keeps getting kudos for publishing wonderful stuff. I expressed interest in this piece he’d told me about so he sent me a copy. As I read it I was horrified. It was so poorly written I wouldn’t have accepted it from a student. I never got up the nerve to tell him how awful it was.

Anyway, I’m revising this piece based on some really negative feedback from a blind reviewer (maybe if I’d been blindly reviewing my colleague’s piece I’d have had more courage). I was initially saddened by the negative feedback until I started working on the revision yesterday and I discovered that most of the comments made are incorrect. So someone who doesn’t really understand the scholarship I’m basing the article on has decided that I didn’t interpret it correctly. I suppose I always feel that I’m not being a good reviewer when I blind review stuff – that I’m always missing the point of what the writer is saying. I always try to ascribe to the writer the benefit of knowing what she’s saying. I figure if I miss it, it’s my problem. But if, after reading the piece, three or four times, I still can’t figure it out then I think something may be missing. But really. I try not to correct things that I’m not sure about as this reviewer has done to me. She/he “corrects” a specific term used by a specific scholar. But the term is correct as used. It’s just that sort of thing that tells me the reviewer isn’t paying the right kind of attention.