A plea to CC editors

[PaulMaplesden]

I appreciate that the editors at CC have a difficult job and deal with many different styles, approaches and topics on a daily basis. I also appreciate that there are often good reasons to request an article is reviewed or rejected. However, I have noticed that certain editors are returning items for review for what seem to be trivial reasons, when it would just save everyone's time (the author and the editor needing to re-review) if they could just make a minor correction and accept the article.

I have had articles come back to me for missing a full stop at the end of a bullet point, for one or two extraneous words and for having a punctuation point outside of a parenthesis. I have also noticed that editors vary *greatly* in accepting / reviewing / rejecting articles, and what might be acceptable to one editor is not acceptable to another. This can make the writing, submissions and review process quite frustrating and can't be a good use of anyone's time. In other words, it's sometimes about an editor's personal preference than accepted rules of English or CC guidelines.

I'm not asking the CC editors to change anything that they are doing, other than asking if, in some cases where there is only a minor change needed, that the change is made by the editor and the article is accepted. I am certain that would reduce review rates, meaning that the writers could spend more time writing and articles wouldn't need to be reviewed twice.

Thanks for listening.

[Lysis]

Shoulda been here back in the day when 1 typo got your article purged and rejected from the system. You had to redo your overview and keywords and resubmit the article. And, sometimes they didn't tell you what was wrong. You have to find the typo. lol

This place is why I never use a semicolon ever. The rejection area was filled with English majors complaining that their semicolon was right.

Nostalgia!

[gators18]

Then you have the psycho editor making up requirements that aren't in the guidelines and aren't used by other editors. Make sure your article doesn't get reviewed on Friday night if it doesn't have a conclusion.

[dbvirago]

Yeah, I just got started back here after a short break - I have over 300 articles online. First six articles accepted quickly and 2 sold almost immediately. Then it hit the skids. Articles are getting reviewed once every few days, with numerous trivial edits. I've had 6 in a row rejected and I've had to go in and work through all the strike-throughs. In the last one, I'm referring to someone's palace as 'his palace.' The editor changed it to the palace. Sentences got changed such as 'Whatever garden you plan to visit, it is worthwhile to do your homework to determine the best time of year,' with the it is worthwhile struck out. Is it extraneous? Maybe, but it's what I wanted the sentence to say and there isn't anything incorrect about it.

It may be time for another break.

P.S. Agree re the semi-colon. I will never use one here for any reason.

p.p.s. Also got the summary guy a couple of times. I had summaries, but they were one or two sentences. Have to be 3 sentences. Judge Woppner's at five.

[Pellucidean]

The editors are definitely inconsistent. I'm confident that if you got all of them together in one room and asked them to each edit the same article, you would get a wide variety of results. Many of my articles sail right through, but then sometimes I'll get one back filled with strikethroughs. Usually they want any words that could be considered extraneous at all to be cut out. Which is fine, I guess, but if that same article had gone to another editor I'm sure it wouldn't have been returned. So I mostly edit my articles the way that seems right to me, and don't worry about the occasional article that fails to get through.
The nice thing about the strikethrough method of editing is that it makes correcting very quick. It's better than being told to rework the whole article or something like that.

Incidentally I use semicolons fairly often and I don't remember ever getting dinged for one.

[Judith]

The rejections that really bother me the most are the ones based on the editor's personal opinion. I had one article on parents teaching their children to eat healthy and the editor rejected it because he or she did not feel parents have the time or inclination to lecture to their children about health. I resubmitted it a few days later with no changes, and it was accepted and sold the same day. Just recently I submitted an article about a certain type of real estate loan. It was rejected with the comment that everything that could be said about that loan could be said in a single sentence. there was no need to write a whole article about it. I will change the name and resubmit in a couple of weeks.

These are the kinds of rejections that I find very annoying.

[Lysis]

Oh, Judith, I haven't had one of those in ages thank god. Those *are* annoying. I stick to mainly tech, and whoever eds that area is pretty cool to me.

There is one ed here who really hates my writing. Not sure what to think of it. This is why I could never focus on anything creative like writing. One ed hates you and the other one doesn't. Makes it confusing. You don't know if you're good, bad, or maybe it averages out and you're just mediocre. lol

[dbvirago]

That's interesting. I had never had one like that, but just today I had an article rejected and deleted on how to be more productive with smart phones. The editor's comment was that everyone already knows that stuff. Based on my extended family, nothing could be further fromthe truth. They all use Facebook and text messaging, but as far as actually being productive, they don't have a clue. I have put it up for sale elsewhere, but I'm glad I'm not the only one with that type of rejection.