Guidance and constructive criticism for rejections

[HayleyWriter]

Hi Barry,

First of all, the sentence will get the article rejected anyway, even before the punctuation is taken into account. As Lysis has said, the use of "we" constitutes first person point of view, bringing the author's identity into the article. Secondly, there are several words which can be deleted, making the article concise and clear (adding clarity) for readers. You can rewrite the sentence to avoid the use of the colon or semi colon in any event. My suggestion for the sentence is:

Add two sliced lemons and oranges, six tablespoons of honey, and half a teaspoon of finely chopped whatevers into the mix.

You will not need to capitalise lemon then. Also, I still find this sentence confusing as a reader. Do you mean two oranges and two lemons, or one orange and one lemon totalling two citrus fruits, or can I add two oranges and no lemons to whatever I am making? Do I peel the fruits first? How thinly or thickly do I slice the fruit? These are the sorts of questions that could lead to Ed rejecting the article on clarity issues.

UK English is fine, as long as you use it consistently throughout the article. Don't mix up US English and UK English in the same article. I actually use both styles (in different articles, of course), depending on which audience I am aiming for with the article.

If you want further help with the article, you could send it to me on the email system and I'll have a look and see if I can come up with any other constructive criticism for you! Just click on my profile in the author page and then click on Contact this Author to get an email up. However, you are getting heaps of advice - I've tried to submit this post twice now and both times someone else beat me to it and I had to change what I had said. Third time lucky...

Kind regards,

Hayley

[barrywiki]

Thanks, guys! Especially for the speed of the responses. I guess it's evening there while it's some unearthly hour of the morning here in Greece so we must be in a short window when we are all online at the same time.

Anyway, thanks for the advice, I will resubmit when I have fiddled about with it.

Incidentally, the rejection note didn't refer to the use of first person as in the 'we' in the above sentence. Maybe, because the style of the article is one of empathy, the we was allowed once or twice. Ed can chime in on that if I am wide of the mark. I think I will rewrite those bits anyway, just to be sure.

Thanks again.
Barry

[HayleyWriter]

Hi Barry,

It's actually 4.30pm on Friday afternoon in sunny Sydney!

Hayley

[Celeste Stewart]

10:18 PM in sunny southern California

[barrywiki]

Can I ask something else?

if I submit an article and it gets a rejection listing what is wrong and then I fix the points raised, can it get rejected again for things which have not been mentioned in the first rejection and have gone in again unchanged.

It the article I mentioned earlier, there are numbers in the recipes which people adviced against and also people were saying that it could get rejected for being vague or unclear but these were not mentioned in the rejection notice so I am assuming there was no problem with these points. Am I correct on this?

08:34 here. Sunny

[HayleyWriter]

Hi Barry,

Actually, the rejection notice may not cover all the issues with the article. Ed often stops reading at the first problem and doesn't bother going through the rest of the article for other errors. You probably won't get rejected for numbers, although you do need to be consistent in your treatment of numbers in the same article, but you should double check for clarity. Think about every word you have used and consider whether the word is essential to the essence of the sentence, or adds nothing but extra words. Those extra words can impede clarity.

Hope this helps,

Hayley

Now 5.35pm but still sunny!

[Celeste Stewart]

Once Ed stumbles on a reason why an article isn't quite ready, he pretty much stops reading. If the first sentence has a glaring error, he presumably hits that "reject" button. YOu can't be sure though. Sometimes Ed reads the entire article and then declines it giving an explanation of one sort or the other. However, title errors, format errors, short summary errors, glaring errors right off the bat, and so forth tend to be rejected right away. You have to assume that the article hasn't been thoroughly reviewed and needs to be looked at thoroughly before resubmitting. Make your changes and then give the article another solid proofreading.

Okay, good night all. I'll see you in my morning. . .

[Ed]

Hi Barry,

I looked for a good resource about colon usage last night. I once had one that seemed to capture all situations in a concise, easy-to-read format. So many yammer on and on, are inconsistent with each other, or don't cover all instances of possible colon usage. Given that I suggested you use one in your title as opposed to a period, I thought it would be confusing if I couldn't find a good source. I'll spend some time today trying to dig up a reference about colon usage that isn't so wordy and ill-formatted that it's useless. The resource in this thread appears to be broken before a refresh, but it does work in the end (PDF).

As for "we." We don't accept the "royal we" when it refers to the author. For example, "Our opinion is that Kindle is the best eBook reader out there!" The usage in the recipe kind of straddled the line. The reader was included - the implication was, "Let's do this together." The idea is not to avoid making the reader go, "Huh? Who?" and to avoid including irrelevant information (ChocoCafe serves the best chocolate cake in Nowhere, PN. We love chocolate.).

And yeah, we should all strive to avoid the random use of capitalization. The following reference is a good go-to guide for using capitalization:
http://www.libraryonline.com/default.asp?pID=48

Thanks,
Ed

[barrywiki]

Thank you for that, Ed.

With loads of help and advice, I have just re-written and re-submitted the article. My fingers (as well as everything else) are crossed.

Whether it gets bounced back again or not I want to say a massive 'THANK YOU' to Hayleywriter for loads of sensible suggestions and pointers via the internal e-mail. Thanks, Hayley!

Best bit of news has been that my wife has beaten me to it! She had one article approved on Wednesday and it sold today, just three days later. First blood to her! No sour grapes here - I am so proud of her and it gives me a big incentive to keep tapping away on the laptop.

P.S. Pouring with rain today

[HayleyWriter]

Hi Barry,

Congratulations to your wife on the first sale! I hope it is the first of many for both of you!

Kind regards,

Hayley