Pushing through revision

That's my day today. (I give an exam in my only class of the day).

I've incorporated most of the first reviewer's comments. (I figured the only sane way to do it was to take one reviewer at a time, because often reviewer comments contradict - and it leads to a brain deadlock for me to look at two contradictory comments simultaneously.) So now I go look in more detail at Reviewer 2, and hope he/she isn't going to tell me to put back in a bunch of the stuff Reviewer 1 told me to remove. (I do ALWAYS keep an original copy of the paper....I renamed this file "REVISED [papername]" just in case).

I never know which comments to follow, and which to ignore. I probably incorporate more reviewer's suggestions than some folks do, just because it's my nature to assume other people's opinions are somehow more "correct" than my own. (Though I will admit to rewriting a few sentences in response to Reviewer 1 which were more in the IF YOU HAD READ WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID YOU WOULD SEE mode, only a lot more "coded" than that.)

I dunno. I kind of hate revising because there is the whole "check your ego at the door" aspect of it. Yes, some of the reviewer comments really did lead to "tighter" and better writing. But it irks me, after spending multiple rewrites to get an organization that works in my brain, to be told "WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN....REARRANGE EVERYTHING."

My plan is to finish the rewrite today, and then do one last read of it Thursday (and maybe another Friday) just to be sure my moving and changing and shifting has not led to any bêtises or infelicities.

Edited to add:

It's not always "reviewer 3." (There is a legend, in the journal-article-writing circles, that it's always 'reviewer 3' who demands unreasonable changes, seems to willfully misunderstand your experimental design, and suggests (read: demands) incorporation of theory that is at best tangentially related to the question at hand). (In fact, it's such a legend, there used to be up on youtube a reworking of a famous scene from a movie about Hitler, where they had re-subtitled it to make it as if Hitler were responding to the comments of the third reviewer. It was utterly hilarious (well, as hilarious as anything referencing Hitler can be...and yeah, it's one of those, "I'm probably spending a few more days in Purgatory for laughing at this one, but I'm laughing anyway" things). It was called something like "Peer review circa 1945" but I think it's since been taken down because of a copyright dispute between the movie's original director (? I think) and all the parodists)

Suffice it to say, anyone who had seen that bit who has written articles for publication...they can relate.

I don't have three reviewers on this; I'm having some issues with the second one, though.

A journal article acknowledgment you will never see, but that I suspect many wish they could write: "I thank my co-workers and funding source. I also thank one anonymous reviewer, whose comments made the paper stronger and better. The other anonymous reviewer, however, can go pound sand."

***

Another thought on the hipster-chick glasses issue: one of my Twitter friends ("Twitends"?) pointed me to a picture of the true hipster-chick-glasses phenomenon: for one thing, they're very self-consciously heavy black plastic frames. And for another, I suspect at least some of those glasses of having plate glass, rather than prescription lenses, in them. So they're not so much Hipster Glasses as Poseur Glasses. As opposed to those of us who wear glasses because we need vision correction and are squicked out by contacts/have too many allergies to wear contacts/work in a lab where the fumes would make contacts dangerous/just think we look better with glasses than we would with contacts/don't want to mess with all the cleaning processes. (Several of those apply to me).

So perhaps this is the best last word on the subject: