Academic Manuscripts & Journal Articles

The following list of phrases and their definitions might help you understand the mysterious language of science (including psychology) and medicine. These special phrases are also applicable to anyone reading a PhD dissertation or academic paper.

• "IT HAS LONG BEEN KNOWN" ... I didn't look up the original reference.
• "A DEFINITE TREND IS EVIDENT" ... These data are practically meaningless.
• "WHILE IT HAS NOT BEEN POSSIBLE TO PROVIDE DEFINITE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS" ... An unsuccessful experiment, but I still hope to get it published.
• "THREE OF THE SAMPLES WERE CHOSEN FOR DETAILED STUDY" ... The other results didn't make any sense.
• "TYPICAL RESULTS ARE SHOWN" ... This is the prettiest graph.
• "THESE RESULTS WILL BE IN A SUBSEQUENT REPORT" ... I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
• "IN MY EXPERIENCE" ... Once
• "IN CASE AFTER CASE" ... Twice
• "IN A SERIES OF CASES" ... Thrice
• "IT IS BELIEVED THAT" ... I think.
• "IT IS GENERALLY BELIEVED THAT" ... A couple of others think so, too.
• "CORRECT WITHIN AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE" ... Wrong.
• "ACCORDING TO STATISTICAL ANALYSIS" ... Rumor has it.
• "A STATISTICALLY-ORIENTED PROJECTION OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE FINDINGS" ... A wild guess.
• "A CAREFUL ANALYSIS OF OBTAINABLE DATA" ... Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass of beer.
• "IT IS CLEAR THAT MUCH ADDITIONAL WORK WILL BE REQUIRED BEFORE A COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PHENOMENON OCCURS" ... I don't understand it
• "AFTER ADDITIONAL STUDY BY MY COLLEAGUES" ... They don't understand it either.
• "THANKS ARE DUE TO JOE BLOGGS FOR ASSISTANCE WITH THE EXPERIMENT AND TO CINDY ADAMS FOR VALUABLE DISCUSSIONS" ... Mr. Bloggs did the work and Ms. Adams explained to me what it meant.
• "A HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT AREA FOR EXPLORATORY STUDY" ... A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
• "IT IS HOPED THAT THIS STUDY WILL STIMULATE FURTHER 1NVESTIGATION IN THIS FIELD" ... I quit.

attributed to Dan Horn, Shane Mueller, Jennifer Glass, Paul Hamilton, & Heather Pond, University of Michigan, Happy Hour

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

• Always avoid alliteration.
• Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
• Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
• Employ the vernacular.
• Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
• Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
• It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
• Contractions aren't necessary.
• Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
• One should never generalize.
• Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
• Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
• Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
• Profanity sucks.
• Be more or less specific.
• Understatement is always best.
• Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
• One-word sentences? Eliminate.
• Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
• The passive voice is to be avoided.
• Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
• Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
• Who needs rhetorical questions?

Frank L. Visco

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of MS #85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised version of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamned running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some sort of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask her or him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter b*mbs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as reviewer C suggested), several of my ancestry were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to do this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works the he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. the only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions by other reviewers.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of you scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers sends to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked this paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't or wouldn't, have done it without your input.

Sincerely,
[Name Removed for Blind Review]

Attributed University of Pennsylvania, Psychology, Humor Page, 1998