How to Respond Well to a Blind Peer Review

One thing that's occurred to me: many ECRs and grad students have probably never seen a good response from an author to an editor over a peer review. It's not a genre of writing commonly shared.

So this message (see below) is something I just submitted to a journal editor. The peer reviewer was thoughtful and considerate one -- believe it or not, these are more common than the other kind! -- but I wasn't thrilled with the direction the reviewer was suggesting I go.

This is a successful example, too ... the journal editor was cool with this proposal, and I suspect most journal editors would have been: they just want to see a sincere engagement by authors with their reader reports.

Btw, nota bene: when I'm doing a blind peer review, I personally don't necessarily expect authors to follow my suggestions. As a reviewer (and as with teaching), you offer authors/students suggestions in order to jumpstart their thinking. The important thing, as I suggested above, is that they see the underlying issue you're pointing out and seek to remedy that issue in some fashion. If that involves taking your suggestion, great. If not, that's great too.

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Hello ------,

I've now had a chance to go over the reviewer's comments carefully, and I wanted to ask your advice. The reviewer's main suggestion is to ditch the modernism aspect to my article, and just focus on the textual history of Lewis's poem and his interests in psychoanalysis. However, that modernism angle is the central conceit of my article, and although the reviewer themself is more interested "Lewis’s thinking about the relationship between psychoanalysis and theology than .... his Modernism," that's not my own interest.

However, I think the core part of the reviewer's objections concerns the interminable question of "Is it really Modernism," a question that's certainly passe within the New Modernist Studies. Re-reading my article, I think I can avoid that whole question (which really is fruitless) simply by emphasizing that the psychoanalytic angle as what I mean by "modernism" in this context. That's not even much of a stretch -- the modernist claims of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Forster's A Passage to India mainly just depend on a few borrowings from Freud.

This would represent a much less drastic revision than what the reviewer is suggesting, but it's the area I want to go. If you're okay with this, I can get my revision to you by [...], as per your original message. If that's too tight a turnaround [...], however, or if you'd like to resend the revised version to the reviewer (which would mean that this article won't make the [next] issue), that's fine -- just let me know.

Cheers,
Dennis

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