Louise Pay, PhD
louisepay.bsky.social
Louise Pay, PhD
@louisepay.bsky.social
53 followers 47 following 380 posts
Scientific & Crisis Comms Consultant Academic Editor
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Higher education is increasingly being drawn into culture wars, and this is a really great resource for protecting both individual faculty and university campuses.
You’ll find several resources on this website, including an outline of how I can help you.
I’ve partnered with Faculty First Responders, which is providing resources, mentoring, and guidelines for you and administrators on effective responses and upholding academic freedom.
University faculty facing harassment, doxxing, retaliation… this is for you.
So the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a regulatory inquiry into your work. Everything is falling apart…

How will you maintain their trust in you and your credibility?

open.substack.com/pub/louisepa...
Strategic Communication during an NIH Regulatory Inquiry
Hoping it will never happen to you won't help if it does...
open.substack.com
(I strongly advise against watching the video. I saw it before I realized what I was looking at)
We’re people first, and the death of those we disagree with isn’t something to be celebrated.
Hopefully not an unpopular opinion, but it’s OK to be sad seeing a video of a man being killed on your social media timeline regardless of whether you liked him or agreed with his political beliefs. It’s OK if your human nature and your politics don’t always align.
Handling the “not a question but a comment” person at your #academic conference talk Q&A
Tired of tables moving all over the place in your Word document? Try this!
The right phrasing is nice… but getting published brings the happiness here.

Have a phrasing issue with your reviewers and not sure what approach to take? Feel free to DM me!

#academic #editing #peerreview #nightmares #phrasing
I always come back to a question I often ask my clients when things like this come up: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy (you can’t have both)?
Ultimately, a few bad sentences is not as important of an issue as getting critical work published.
(I would have taken a different approach if the changes would have affected clarity or altered the meaning. In that case, I’d have written a response to the reviewers outlining why we weren’t making the changes)
I made a point to explain why the original sentences were good (and better) so the author wouldn’t think their phrasing was bad… then suggested making the reviewer-recommended changes to avoid further “revise & resubmit” responses.
And they were part of a very short list of reviewer requests.
Did the sentences the reviewers wanted introduce wordiness, unnatural phrasing, and awkward sentence structure?

Yes.

But they *didn’t* obscure the author’s meaning.
As much as it hurts my editor brain to say this, sometimes, if requested changes to language that you don’t agree with are the only thing between your manuscript and publication, it can be the right choice to make those changes.
The reviewers also indicated that the paper would be accepted if the authors made these (and a couple of other) minor changes.
I recently edited a response to reviewers letter where the reviewers had pulled out a few of the author’s very nicely structured sentences and told them that they needed to change these to… not so nicely structured sentences.
How to delete all comments from a Microsoft Word document with one click:
Coauthor screwed up your formatting? Here’s a quick fix #microsoftword
Non-breaking spaces are formatting tools, not a sign of #AI writing
This key can be used for subtraction if you're typing into the calculator/in Excel, but it does NOT insert a correct minus sign in a Word document. It inserts a hyphen. Does that matter? Potentially more than you think, as many journals specifically want actual minus signs and not hyphens.