The Anonymous Reader

This is what happens: you submit an article to a journal -- The Journal of Iberian Delights, say -- you wait between 3 months and 2 years, and either hear nothing, or receive an acceptance of your article but don't pop the cava just yet because it's pending revisions. If your article gets a qualified acceptance, you also get at least two "reader reports," in which anonymous so-called experts rip your writing to shreds. They second-guess your academic preparation; they assume, given your pathetic grasp of style, that your second language is English; they list 50 books that any idiot with a public library (much less a Ph.D.) should have read by now; they tell you you've made up words; they don't like any of your metaphors; they cut down the entire premise of your argument; in short: they eat you alive.

I am now one of those "anonymous readers" for an article more or less relevant to my field and...um... it's actually not so easy to be a cheerful, encouraging, impressed editor when what you're reading doesn't make any sense. And not making sense for 30 pages is quite an achievement. I'm not going to give any more details to protect the innocent, but sufficed to say, I'm feeling a little better about all those sharks who have bitten chunks out of my academic future in the past... now that I'm one of them.