Someone rightly said that : " There is no great writing, only great rewriting"
As a writer, i do come across some interesting personalities who simply make my day. Let me start with the Know it All creature who considers the dear tech writer to be a mere mortal whose ultimate, aim should be to merely beautify the document. So, here are few tips to provide great review and make the writer's day
- Review Quality - Reviewer should check for aspects such as quality of work being considered for publishing. Check for factors such as logical appearance of text that match the introductions and good placement of text and tables. The aim of the review process is to ensure that the paper in question is publishable. Provide the strenghths along with the weaknesses about the article in question and not the writer.
- Be timely - Agreed you may have lot of pending tasks at hand but, ensure that you commit to reviewing an article only when you are ready. Be prompt in providing the reviews by getting the articles checked for accuracy, preciseness, and timeliness
- Read carefully - Once you receive an article for review, read through each paragraph to check for readability and accuracy. Don't just comment or judge the article based on few lines as there maybe more details in the later sections of the document.
- Avoid personal comments - While reviewing the work, judge the article and not the writer in question. State your comments in an affirmative manner rather than stating statements such as The authors obviously were poorly trained, as evidenced by their blunder of confounding Factor X with Factor Y, so this entire line of research was a waste of time.”
That's all for now...more to come!
