"I have, on at least one occasion been unfortunate enough to receive several barely readable manuscripts (in which I strongly suggested someone look over the manuscript for proper English, in addition to offering my own grammatical and typographical corrections) from a particular journal. When they came calling again, I told them to forget it, they had filled their quota of reviews with me for the year and they needed to find some other poor sucker willing to read some horribly written manuscripts".(my emphasis)
This was written by Thomas Joseph, as a comment on a fascinating blog entry at DrugMonkey's blog about rejecting manuscripts solely based on it being poorly written (bad use of English). Check it out. C'mon, go there now... I give you permission to leave my blog (for a minute or two) :-)
An example of horrid English use....
2 Comments:
To be honest, between horrible English (common), and horrible science (... >_>), we'd probably still prefer the former...
Well, I'm sure we all agree on that.
(regarding drugmonkey's post...)
Being a non native speaker myself, I'd make the effort. I've read some really badly written articles, but none so bad that I didn't get the main idea behind the article. As you say, the first thing to review is the science.
Sure we can ask for the article to be rewritten, but to dismiss it because you can't get through the first paragraph after a quick read on your cell phone, is just wrong.
Thanks for your comment! It's nice to see someone else reads this stuff :-P
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