{"id":4483,"date":"2017-03-06T08:35:02","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T15:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.library.ualberta.ca\/ualbertapressblog\/2017\/03\/06\/letters-to-a-young-reader-of-reviews-by-james-gifford\/"},"modified":"2018-10-29T09:13:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-29T15:13:24","slug":"letters-to-a-young-reader-of-reviews-by-james-gifford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.library.ualberta.ca\/ualbertapressblog\/2017\/03\/06\/letters-to-a-young-reader-of-reviews-by-james-gifford\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters to a Young Reader of Reviews by James Gifford"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Young Reader, or Old(er) for that matter. We hope you’ll enjoy James Gifford’s musings about how to deal with reviews of a\u00a0more negative nature. James is a UAP author; we published two of his books, Personal Modernisms<\/a><\/em> and\u00a0From the Elephant’s Back<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Boring, Risible, and Execrable, and Those are Just Its Good Qualities<\/h4>\n

I was invited to write this blog after the marketing team at UAP saw a particularly nasty review of one of my books. I believe they read some of it out loud, perhaps even with accents. It was the kind of review over which even the most casual reader must pause and invent the backstory of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy.<\/p>\n

The reality was more mundane than salacious, and the risks of liquidity (ahem) in academia all too often lead to short tempers and long, if blurry, memories. However, like college hazings or British prime ministers with pig\u2019s heads, the insult review is an initiatory rite in academia to which we all submit\u2014and the point isn\u2019t so much how to avoid them as it is how to avoid reading them. Either Boethius or Buzzfeed, I can\u2019t recall which, had sage advice on the matter. And no one ever pays attention to it:<\/p>\n

\u201cNever read the comments\u201d<\/h4>\n

For academics early in their careers, not reading the comments isn\u2019t an option. The negative reviews may not be public, but the privacy of blind peer review can make the commentary all the more biting. To add to it, the pressures of early career \u201cprofessionalization\u201d mean graduate students are pushed to develop a research profile that often necessitates sending out work before it\u2019s ready or before the authors are ready for the professional grumpiness that can be voiced behind the curtain of blind review, like some irascible Wizard of the U of Oz. Yet reading those reviews is also often the main source of feedback for developing the work. So how should we read and yet \u201cnever read\u201d the comments?<\/p>\n

I have always found it helpful to look at the disagreements in reviews. It\u2019s easy when Reader A adores what Reader B condemns as \u201cexecrable.\u201d This was my favourite word scrawled on one of my undergraduate Chaucer essays juxtaposed to \u201cA-\u201d and a rather liquid harrumph of explanation: \u201cThat must have been near the bottom of the pile…\u201d meaning late in the night and deep in the cup. He was a fantastic Chaucer teacher, actually. When readers disagree in this way, any author can easily think \u201cReader A is clearly a good human being with a history of volunteerism and charity for small birds in winter months,\u201d but the corollary is too easy. Reader B, after all, may not be picking the legs off ladybugs in her or his few spare moments between stealing markers from the whiteboards in classrooms and using them to scrawl \u201cexecrable\u201d on the front of undergraduate papers. And who\u2019s to say my \u201cA-\u201d trumps the descriptor \u201cexecrable\u201d? I was, after all, young and foolish enough to disagree with my professor\u2026<\/p>\n

The truth is, the disagreements are what matter. Even if the disagreement is between your research findings and the reader\u2019s response, that disagreement is the issue at hand, and not necessarily how one or the other of you is wrong. Speaking to those disagreements in revisions is, most often, a more effective response than bending to the disparagements, rejecting them, or tearfully taking up a cup of the same \u201cproof\u201d of God\u2019s love (so said Benjamin Franklin) that nurtured the grumpiness in the first place.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say an author shouldn\u2019t be mindful of when a methodology might be wrong or data collection methods insufficient\u2014those problems are real across most disciplines, qualitative or quantitative. We have blind review exactly for the purpose of catching those slips and exactly because they\u2019re hardest for a like mind to spot. The sympathetic reader is also not the keen reader. However, such slips are also not personal. And as much as possible, they don\u2019t grump or offer sour (even fermented) grapes. They propose improvements, which is for the best of the authors and readers alike.<\/p>\n

But who wrote the comments?<\/h4>\n

It doesn\u2019t actually matter who wrote something grumpy. It may be better to ask, what were the circumstances?<\/p>\n

Mostly likely, reviews are written in haste and between other commitments, very often without much time for reflection or revision. I\u2019ve probably reviewed 25 book manuscripts, more than double that for articles, and outside of blind review I have the dubious distinction of nearing a double fistful of years contributing to the always enormous Year\u2019s Work in English Studies. It means I\u2019ve published hundreds of book reviews. So I have a good deal of sympathy for the life of the humble reviewer.<\/p>\n

Reviews are always service work, often done outside of work hours and after all the other chores are done. Which is to say, those circumstances also wrote the comments. So the onus is to be a more generous author than reviewer, because that\u2019s the truth of it\u2014everyone spends more care on their own work than remarking on another\u2019s, so authors have the burden of generosity in reading the hasty scrawlings of their evaluators. Rather than the #humblebrag answer of compassion for the reviewer\u2019s self-evident idiocy, simply recognizing that grumpiness is beyond both interlocutors\u2019 control can be a real help.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Have Shot Mine Arrow O\u2019er The House, And Hurt My Brother\u201d<\/h4>\n

There is also the distinct possibility that the grumpiness never existed in the first place\u2026 Like the broken kettle, the reviewer didn\u2019t get grumpy, the review wasn\u2019t grumpy when it was written, and the reviewer never wrote it in the first place.<\/p>\n

I reviewed a work of Canadian literary studies some time ago only to discover after the copy editor had \u201ctidied\u201d it up that I had, myself, shone not light, but rather grumpiness. A few select cuts here and a bit less punctuation there made a hesitation into a rather snide snipe. Albeit, I didn\u2019t suggest the author was of the genus Suidae nor given to inappropriate relations with future prime ministers, but the result was nevertheless something decidedly harsher than I would have wished. Sometimes things just happen: the material conditions of production can lead to unanticipated negations.<\/p>\n

The Hatchet Job of the Year<\/h4>\n

H.L. Mencken said of The Great Gatsby, that the American masterpiece is \u201cno more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.\u201d As reviews go, it\u2019s fairly kind. The Hatchet Job of the Year was established in 2012 to reward negative reviews, and even those at the hatchet end of the stick must admit that no press is bad press. That is, \u201cno press\u201d is worse than \u201cbad press,\u201d and not by a little: by a lot. Bad reviews open curiosity as much as anything else. What remains is the question of exactly what is in the piece that is so eminently provocative? The labour put into a nasty review is itself a clear indication of the merits of keeping calm and carrying on. You can even say as much to your editor.<\/p>\n

What to Say to Friends and Colleagues<\/h4>\n

So, what is one to do? In no particular order, I tend to give friends and colleagues variants on five points:<\/p>\n

1. Acknowledging disagreements is often better than resolving them.
\n2. Never read the comments. And after you do, don\u2019t answer them in kind.
\n3. Editors often recognize that intensely dismissive reviews are one way of expressing an even more intense interest. That interest is likely to be shared by other readers, so it\u2019s worth bringing the project to completion.
\n4. We who survived (post)graduate studies are used to sorting through the liquid bluster of an angry chap at the pub working through his (often but not always \u201chis\u201d) childhood disappointments. If you can understand his directions to the toilets, it\u2019s likely you can understand what grains of truth are to be gleaned from a hatchet review.
\n5. Always, always ask your editor for advice. Inevitably, she or he knows more than you about the exigencies of the review as well as the needs of the press.<\/p>\n

So, put on your best impersonation of the grumpy reviewer (accents help), and read aloud with bluster. Then get the revisions in, on time, and carry on.<\/p>\n

~ James Gifford
\nTwitter\u00a0@GiffordJames
\nhttps:\/\/www.ualberta.ca\/~gifford\/<\/p>\n