Four Writing Fixes That Turn Rejections Into Acceptances (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I used to blame journal reviewers when my manuscripts got rejected. They must be too busy, too careless, or just didn't get it. I'd spend weekends rewriting paragraphs, frustrated and confused, but my papers just kept getting rejected. And then I discovered something simple. Reviewers don't reject good ideas. They reject confusing writing. So, what I'm going to do in this video is share with you four main tips and strategies that I learned the hard way that helped me go from reject to accept. So, it was about two to three years into my research career. I just finished my PhD when I published a bunch of papers and I was transitioning into my postdoc, that phase where you're supposed to become increasingly more independent on the path to being an assistant professor on the tenure track. It was at this time I felt I had written some of my best papers. I'd gotten a lot of my papers for my PhD published in very good journals, but these were my best papers. And yet, they kept getting rejected over and over again. And what was frustrating was it felt like the reviewers just didn't get it. So, at the beginning, I was blaming the journals, I was blaming the reviewers, thinking, oh, they're too busy, they're too careless, they're just being dumb. But still, I would spend weekends rewriting paragraphs, feeling really frustrated and confused. And I knew my work was solid because I had published before, but these manuscripts were just getting an awful ride. And after a while, when this first happens, it's easy to start invoking reviewer 2 memes, the horrible reviewers in journals like this, but I started to realize as it happened over and over that the common denominator was me. There was something that I needed to improve, except I wasn't really sure what it was. So, I really started to scrutinize my own work. And I really started to scrutinize it with a view to, well, what's creating these misunderstandings that the reviewer don't get it? For context, this was at the stage where it wasn't getting desk rejected by the editors, the papers were getting sent out for review. So, I was clearing that first hurdle. But my funk is, then they would go for review and average review times two to four months. They would then come back after review and reviewers were missing things almost, like things that were in the paper that they didn't understand or even sometimes would say, well, the authors need to do X, Y, and Z. And I actually done X, Y, and Z in the paper. And believe me, this happens much more commonly than you might believe. So, I did four things that ultimately fixed this problem for me and boost my acceptance. So, the first one was I discovered something simple. Reviewers aren't rejecting good ideas. They're rejecting confusing writing. And I wasn't really using any writing style or framework or template. I was just kind of writing, shooting a bit from the hip, writing from my gut. And I didn't have a formalized template or a system. Ultimately, what I learned formed the basis of the FastTrack system. Check out the links below if you're interested in what our system could do for you to save you time and help boost your acceptance rates too. But that led to the development of my Peer system. It's a very simple academic writing system and this is going to change your life if you've never used an academic writing system. So, the simple reliable method of Peer is a little bit like a hamburger and it's kind of the basic unit of your writing in a scientific paper, which is the paragraph. And reviewers love clear, concise, instantly understandable text. So, the Peer model really has four components, like the acronym Peer. And the first is the P. So, you want to start with a single clear topic sentence. That's your paragraph's big idea. And that's kind of like the top hamburger bun. The second is the evidence. So, follow immediately with evidence or an example to back up that point. It could be data, citation, or examples. And then you want to have the next E, which is kind of like the meat. Then you've got other condiments right there next to it. So, you want to explain and quickly explain why this evidence matters and what it means. And then you have a repeating or linking point that's going to help you have a smooth flow into your next paragraph. And so, when I went back and looked over my writing, what happened is it just wasn't clear enough, especially for reviewers who are often just taking a glance at your paper. And that is a recipe for misunderstanding, but that is the nature of the field. That is what everybody is doing. Reviewers are taking a deep read of your paper, but also a superficial one, trying to grasp the main points of what you did. So, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to understand. And that's why this peer system is going to help simplify and make your writing more accessible. Here's how simple it is in practice. I've got an example here. And this is a textbook peer. So, what you have is this first sentence that shows regular physical activity can significantly reduce symptoms of depression among adults. That's the big point. That is what you're going to show in this entire paragraph. And I'm going to back that up immediately with some evidence. So, here's a couple citations that show that. This one by Smith and colleagues, another one by Lee and colleagues. So, that is that second part of our hamburger model. And then, we might later on with those examples, we might explain it a bit to then say what these findings mean. Here, these findings suggest that even minimal but consistent exercise can have a measurable impact on mental well-being, etc., etc. And then, I'm going to have a linking section that I'm going to say this is a non-pharmacological strategy that can be used in mind-body interventions. And so, that kind of drives the car in this paragraph to say, well, now I'm going to go talk about different interventions that I've perhaps tried to build on or layered in this kind of evidence. So, this is really simple. You can do a quick test in your own writing to see if you're following peer. If you're following peer, you should be able to look at each paragraph's main point and skip from one to the next. I sometimes call this the skip test. And you should be able, just like a reviewer, at a glance to get your paragraph. If you're getting lost, and a common mistake I see is people are smushing too many points together, your reviewers are, it's just, it's not guaranteed they're going to get lost, but your reviewers and readers have to do a whole lot more work to understand your point. And so, for you to get the best peer review possible, you want them to not get this, the reviewers didn't get it, dumb reviewer two. You want to make sure that they really understand easily the point that you're trying to make. So, be honest with yourself. Do that quick skip test. Let me know in the comments what happens with yours and if this helps you fix it. Let's move to the second thing I learned. And this is linearity. Look, academic writing is not the time to write a Pulitzer Prize with a fancy double helix style of interwoven narratives that you sometimes see in the New Yorker, right? Which is fantastic reading. I love it. It's engaging. But you want to communicate information as cleanly, concisely, and linearly as possible. And so, when I was going back over my postmortems of my rejection letters, I realized that sometimes my sections that were often getting misunderstood the most, and one of the most important ones, the method section, wasn't linear. So, I would sometimes write about, for example, I was doing quant work, I'd write about the statistical analysis here, and then maybe the variables there, and then maybe the data collection after, and all the material was there, but it wasn't linearly laid out. And look, people just follow things when they're more linear, right? If you're going to tell someone to bake a cake, you wouldn't say, okay, first put the sugar and then the flour. Look, I'm not good at baking cakes, but I am good at writing method sections. So, you know, by keeping it linear, people have this almost cookbook recipe that they can follow. This is important because what reviewers are trying to do is reconstruct in their own mind what your paper did. So, they first will need to have clarity about what your paper did and what it found before they can effectively engage with it. And sometimes the reviewers are stuck before they even start because they can't fully make out what your paper did, and that's how they miss things, and you get those frustrating, ah, those dumb reviewers, they just didn't get it. So, keep your method section linear, and I guarantee you, you're going to have so much more effective engagement with everybody in your orbit, your co-authors, your peers, your friends, your grandma, anybody you want to share your paper with, but especially reviewers, if you keep it linear. Moving on to point number three. So, I kept saying, ah, these dumb reviewers, these dumb reviewers, and then it dawned on me, well, why don't I just assume they're dumb? So, what I learned is to simplify things without dumbing down. And, you know, sometimes I realized as I was in this phase of my postdoc, I was writing in a too specialized way, where a lot of my papers, the reviewers clearly sometimes seem to be from different fields. And so, at times, I was using jargon that was highly technical and specialized. I think maybe I was a little insecure at the time, a little bit of my own imposter syndrome. So, I was looking back at my papers, and they were laced up with jargon. People inherently are negative about things that they don't understand. It's just psychological bias and tendency we have. So, I shifted this, well, first, I just got rid of all jargon, where possible. So, I simplified without dumbing down. I assumed people might be in a different field. So, I tended to write now in mind with an intelligent non-expert. And this massively helped resolve the problem. This is, by the way, sometimes one thing we do in our FastTrack mentorship communities, we have a process of internal peer review that right before you submit the paper, we have our group of internal experts, other people in the community, who provide a peer review of your paper. And this really helps to nip in the bud this kind of problem. For yourself, if you don't have that kind of community, of course, check out ours. But get people who are intelligent non-experts to read your paper. Do they understand it? Are there ways that you could simplify that writing to make it accessible to them without dumbing it down? Guarantee you, that is going to help move the needle of getting your papers from reject to accept. Because you just don't know that you're necessarily in that pool of reviewers who are increasingly difficult for editors to find that you're going to get somebody right in your field. Okay, let me move on to the last part that helped me. And this helped me not just with the review, but also with the desk reject side. What was happening was I was smushing too much into my papers. Almost like my paragraphs earlier, except with a whole paper. Taking a concrete example, I had a paper where I was looking at the effect of a policy on development outcomes, broadly. And I thought, oh great, I'm doing more in this paper. I'm looking at all the development outcomes, not just maybe health and environment or different domains and isolation. I was looking at them all. What I hadn't realized is I was actually undermining my own paper. First, I was making it harder to find the right audience for the paper and limiting its potential citability by mushing a whole bunch of stuff together in this case. The second problem was that the big message of the paper sometimes, when I smushed too much in, was getting muddled. So I'd made this kind of rookie error of thinking, oh, I had more methodological sophistication or I'm looking at more outcomes, I'm doing much, much more in this paper. And that wasn't really connected to what the value add was for my readership. So in many cases, I started to think instead of trying to do everything with one paper, that a paper might be a pipeline, it might be a stream of papers. And this gets into a deeper point about getting leverage as an academic so that your paper doesn't just depend on your own blood, sweat, and tears by leveraging other people's time and expertise. But essentially what happened is many of these papers, I split into two or even three. And surprisingly, as a postdoc, I thought, well, there's less of my own blood, sweat, and tears in this paper. It's not as good, but that's not ultimately what mattered. And I was able to get three times the papers still in very high-impact journals for a fraction of the input. And this was a huge revelation for me that transformed my publishing career. Listen, if you find these tips helpful, I would really encourage you to check out our mentorship communities where, again, our goal is to share with you the templates, tips, and the tricks, the things that I developed from learning the hard way and spending years doing postmortems of my own rejections and other rejections to help boost acceptance rates. On my channel, I try to offer the most free and valuable content that I can, but inevitably, working together in a more intimate way, we can do more. Let me know in the comments below what the biggest challenge you're facing is on rejections. I read and reply to every single comment. And let me know if you're able to implement some of these strategies on your own to get more clarity with our peer system, to write in a more linear way, to strip out jargon, and to keep that big defined message of your paper rather than trying to pack two or three papers into one. And again, if reviewers reject your good paper, don't worry. It's all part of the process. If you don't get rejected every now and then, you're just not aiming high enough in your targeting of your journals. Guys, I look forward to seeing you in the next video.