A Second Closer Read: Organization, Paragraph and Sentence-level Review

Once the holistic read is completed, with any relevant revisions noted at that level, and it is clear the article has merit, you can help both the author and editor by conducting a more in-depth review that addresses overall structure, content, and organization of the manuscript, in addition to stylistic and formatting issues.

Journals employ copywriters for their articles, so it is not your job as a reviewer to catch every single grammatical or formatting error. However, if you catch mistakes or see pattern errors (an error that occurs throughout the paper) it is helpful to note that for the author. Also, as I often tell my students when they peer review each others’ papers, it is not the reviewer’s job to fix the errors, but it is the reviewers job to point out where errors exist. You can simply leave a comment such as “The meaning of this sentence is unclear” and leave it to the author to rework their writing for clarity

Most common errors:

• Formatting and style oversights (Depending on the required style (i.e., APA, Chicago, or MLA) you may find inconsistencies in citations, references or headers.
• Repetition of ideas
• Wordiness
• Clarity of ideas
• Sentence structure
• Word choice
• Tone
• Tense and voice
• Mechanical and punctuation errors

This second review can be done either using track changes or comments with a manuscript in a Word document. If your manuscript is in pdf form it is typically easier to keep a running list of the issues that you note in a separate document. Generally, manuscript software will allow you to upload files and you can submit both documents. If for some reason the manuscript software will not accept one or both files you can likely email your feedback directly to the editor.