Peer Review Regrets

I've never regretted accepting an article I've accepted. I've never gone back and said I should have rejected that article.

I've never regretted a revise-and-resubmit. in almost all cases, the author has taken my suggestions and published the article. In almost all cases the author has seemed grateful or at least graceful.

The only question, then, is whether I have regretted an outright rejection, a case where the article might have been more easily fixable than I gave it credit for. There is no way to really make this judgment, because it's a subjective measure of where the threshold lies. I've come to realize the system of peer review is rather flawed, and that I've thought of it as fine simply because I assume everyone does it like I do, with prompt, fair, helpful, and thorough reviews. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

A Suggestion for Peer Review

From John Holbo. I think it has some merit, but would be impractical for the reasons I point out in my comment to his post.

Blogging for an Hour

I'm blogging for an hour now. The posts are scheduled to appear on different days, but the point is to do one thing for an hour and thus free up time for other things.

The House

The house really eats up a lot of time during the summer. Today I was on the phone for over an hour trying to order a part for something. The refrigerator's ice-maker gave out too, so the repair guy came for that. There is a list of other things that must be addressed this summer.

The key for me is to be able to write in the morning for at least an hour. Then I can calmly deal with everything else. If a wanted to I could do only house related tasks all summer and never work on my writing at all. For me though, an hour spent with a difficult academic problem is much more enjoyable than 8 hours spent trying to figure out what garage door to buy.

It's About the Ideas

My research is mostly about the ideas, the arguments, and not the information. I see this as a weakness, sometimes, in that I am not doing a lot of archival discoveries. Isn't that cheating? Maybe that's why I have published so much. I was always rebelling against people who found wonderful stuff but didn't have anything to say about it.

My Approach to Note Taking

I take my notes directly in the text of the article I am writing, rather than taking notes on my reading before I begin writing. I will often read without taking notes at all, because it is time-consuming. Later I can go back and remember what the really significant points were, or find the relevant quotations. A lot of reading, unfortunately, is defensive. You might be going through a book just to make sure it's not relevant. You pick up extra knowledge that way, but really it's rapid reading designed to cover your bases.

Since I work on poetry, mostly, I know the poems I'm going to use pretty much by memory. I'm sure if I worked on the novel I would have to take notes on plots and characters in a more systematic way.

Write in the Morning, Research in the Afternoon

I've argued here before that you should begin writing as soon as you begin researching. There should never be a blank page. At the very minimum, you should write for yourself some kind of proposal about what you are looking for. Never just wait to write until you have enough materials gathered, enough books and articles read. What I like to do is to write in the morning, every morning, since I am always working on something, and do the reading and researching in the afternoon, when I am not as alert. For a project that's advanced, this research will involve tracking down stray references. For example I might have claimed that "many critics have argued that..." but I need to find out what critics these are in order to back up my more general impression that this is what the critics think.