Peer Review
Transcript
Terry Olson: Colleagues that, that, well one of the great ways, by the way, is to make sure you have a co-author or you are collaborating on something with someone else who is trying to make the same difference in the profession that you are and then you sanitize each other’s writings. You see awkwardness or inane kinds of things that the other person doesn’t see so you refine one another’s work by working together. And the styles and direction of the paper begin to merge into one and the direction of the paper is better because there were four or six eyes on it than just two.
Susan Meyer: First I show it to my co authors, they get the first chance to beat it up. Then, according to my organization, I have to get external peer review from three people outside my organization. Then I have to send it to policy review to prove I had it peer reviewed—I work for the Federal Government, there’s a procedure, right? They have editing service at the station too, but my stuff never goes through editing, my boss just always says bypass editing. (12:43-13:01 I wish my colleagues would be more critical actually. When you send it to the journals, their peer reviewers find things to say.
Claudia Laycock: My clerk and I read each other’s writings very carefully. If it’s a ruling that I’ve worked on without any help from my clerk, I’ll still have her come in and proof it for me. There are things that spell check doesn’t pick up. One of my favorites is: I’ll type “now” instead of “not,” which becomes a pretty important difference. Instead of saying “the defendant did not prove blah blah blah,” it’ll say “the defendant did now prove da da da,” and so I use her to check and make sure I haven’t done anything ridiculous that’s going to catch me.
Fidel Montero: When I write, I like to use my voice and when I have people edit my work, I make sure that it’s somebody who knows my writing style. My wife is usually my best consultant when it comes to writing because she’s a great writer and she also knows my voice so I’m able to give her papers or documents that I need to submit and she’s wonderful about reading through it and picking out grammar structure and so forth and then I also like to have somebody who doesn’t know my voice and read through it make sure it makes sense to them, so I like to have two people read my work.
Shanna Butler: My writer’s pride of course doesn’t like to be edited and it’s just normal that you don’t like people to change your words but it’s a great process to go through because it makes you better. When I go through my things, I try to make things as good as I can and my first editor in my life is my mom- she’s a writer too. So I’ll send things to her first and I trust her the most and then I’ll take it to my writers group and they’ll come back with comments. You know some of them are existentialists and some of them are left wing, and you know you never know what they’re going to say, but they tell you what the audience will want; especially if they’re very experienced people its very helpful to go to them because your writing might be good but if there’s no audience for it you’re not going to sell it—if that’s what you want to do. If you’re just writing for fun, great, write in your journal, but otherwise it’s really good to take it to other people.