Baby shower

I don't think I've been charting the progress of my paper here. You might remember that I submitted it in March. A few months later I got my reviews back. It was accepted pending some minor revisions. Hooray! The reviews were kind of funny. There are various categories that they have to rate you, using the standard poor-to-excellent scheme. Ironically, the reviewer that gave me the best ratings overall was also the only one that thought my paper should be rejected. Weird. Also, they all rated me very highly for my "clarity", yet they all misunderstood various things. Apparently my writing was very clearly giving wrong impressions. Hmmm.

My revisions were due right around the time of fieldwork, but I managed to address all the comments and return the next draft in time. A little while later I got a request from the associate editor to try to redo a figure so that it would be understandable to a color blind person. Arrr. While it would certainly be better all round for it to be in black-and-white (avoid the color figure charges, for instance), it's very difficult to represent 10 spectra distinctly in greyscale! After a few days of complaining and working valiently at it, I finally achieved a reasonable black-and-white result. Phwew!

Tuesday I got the page proofs from the editor. They did a pretty good job setting it, I only caught a few typos, but oh man, that copy editor was hyphen-crazy! At first I thought that things were newly hyphenated at random, but after a page or so I discovered that there was a rhyme and (actual) grammatical reason to it. Whenever a joint word (such as "remote sensing", which appears quite frequently in my paper) was being used to modify a noun, it was hyphenated. So "remote sensing data" became "remote-sensing data", "repeated measures MANOVA" was now "repeated-measures MANOVA".

Ok.... I know that that hyphen is technically grammatically correct, but it is definitely not standard usage! I don't know that I've ever encountered a hyphenated remote-sensing. The surest way to convince my readers that I don't actually know what I'm talking about would be to allow those nontraditional hyphens to remain there! Needless to say, I systematically removed most of the inserted hyphens.

The editor also added a sprinkling of commas. For the most part, I let them remain. There was one sentence, however, that ended up having a comma every two words. I had to axe a few of those! This was my first experience with editors and their punctuational impositions on your manuscript. (Well, ok, I guess I did have to go through and remove a lot of editor-commas from one of my atmospheric scientist's papers...) It will give me a new understanding for when I read papers in the future. Generally, if I come across a really unwieldy sentence, I entertain disparaging thoughts about the author. Now I'll know that just maybe the editor was to blame. So if you happen to actually read my paper and find a part you don't like, it wasn't me! :D

I'm so excited though. I just sent the corrected proofs back to the editor. They were so fun to look through. They looked so real! So scientific! So professional! I can't wait till my paper is published! I think I should have a party for it :D. Wanna come?