![]() ‘An acetabular labral tear was seen at the two o’clock position’. Traditionally, scientific writing has been in the third person, the so-called passive voice. If there was ever a dilemma for a scientific author, this is it. There are then the active and passive tenses with which I admit to an unreasonable obsession. They should not repeat what is already said in the text. They must not be hard to understand and not so large that the journal needs to publish them sideways. ![]() Think carefully about your use of images and tables. This is to cater for the skim reader, who will read the beginning of a section slowly, speed up through the body of the text, and slow down toward the end. The first few lines of every section of a paper must be perfectly phrased and spelled, as should the final few lines of each section, too. It is the one part of a paper that anyone can access for free, whether it has been published by a subscription journal or, as with JHPS and so many others, Open Access. This is the portion of your paper that the world will see for the rest of time. I wager you will stop for a moment at a paper with an interesting title. Think of when you are undertaking a literature analysis for your research. It needs to carry the nature of the research and perhaps an inkling of the result. First, the title must be short, but not too short, nor too long, but about right. To help a reader focus, there are key points in a submission that are critical. Skimming is very common for scientific readers. Skimming is when you read a paper quickly to obtain a general idea of the meaning. You know what you wish to find but have no idea where it is. ![]() Scanning is when you flash through a document to look for a specific word or item. Readers will spend 70% of their time on the left-hand side of the page and 30% on the right. It is very uncommon for every word to be digested by those who read your work. For a reviewer, I would estimate this might rise to 60%. If you can persuade a reader to look at more than 20% of your writing, you are doing well. For example, a typical reading speed is 250 words/min, with readers and dare I say it reviewers, rarely digesting a full paper. It is also helpful to understand how a reader reads. If you count yourself among this group, please think about the use of an editing agency before you submit your paper. Yet not every country uses English as its first language. Since the arrival of an impact factor for JHPS, so our submission rate has rocketed, with wonderful papers from right around the world. That is not always easy for a global journal. To make this possible, our use of English, especially for an English-language journal such as JHPS, must be immaculate. It is our job to keep the reviewer focused. For academic publishing, if a reviewer misses something, we should blame ourselves, not the reviewer. In the wider world of writing for the mass market, and away from academic publishing, writers say to one another that if they are rejected, the best place to look is in the mirror. The fact is that it is up to us, as authors, to be sure that reviewers read what we wish them to see. The reviewer clearly did not read the manuscript’. ![]() I have lost track of the number of times an author challenges the rejection of their paper by protesting, ‘But I did say such-and-such. They lose focus when it comes to the quality of their writing. I find it perplexing that an author can spend months, even years, undertaking a research project, discover globe-shattering results, and then somehow rush their submission.
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