I wish I could do that!

Q: Do you understand my argument? I don’t think I understand it myself. Can you rewrite the paper for me?

A: I think it’s important to understand the argument when editing. I can only make correct decisions about low-level grammar issues when I understand what the text is trying to say.

That said, reading a text I usually only have a shaky understanding of the content. I don’t have the subject knowledge of a reviewer, and I don’t have the intellectual power to acquire the knowledge to be able to critique the paper at depth over the course of reading it.

So I can only help non-native speaking authors with top-down problems rather than bottom-up ones when they are really obvious like gaps in the logic of the argument or literal repetition (it’s sometimes difficult deciding whether something is redundant or if repetition is justified in order to remind the reader of something said a long time ago in the article.)

Sometimes I do have subject knowledge and see that the author has misunderstood something, Then I have to bring that issue to their attention. But I can’t rewrite the paper for them. A subject reviewer could probably do that for them.

Me at

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