117 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality stated more clearly and more often than one might expect. These matters overlap with language problems, and reflecting critically before you revise on both what you need to tell your readers and the language in which you share that information will often improve your paper immensely. More fundamental are criticisms suggesting that the paper you’ve submitted is too preliminary or not a minimum publishable unit (see Section 1.4), which means that it’s not a complete study – it doesn’t quite tell the whole story needed for an original research paper, for instance – so you’ll need to develop your argument further before resubmitting, and perhaps provide additional evidence, whether you choose to stick with the same journal or not. Similarly critical of the overall argument of your study is the comment that your paper is ‘descriptive.’ Research papers necessarily describe procedures and observations, but they need to do much more than that, so to call a paper ‘descriptive’ is to suggest that the author has not used the data presented in the paper to develop a coherent argument – it lacks, for example, a hypothesis or thesis and a clear line of logic by which that hypothesis or thesis is tested through research and/or trials. This is the sort of problem that requires a return to the drawing board to rethink your purpose in writing and redesign your argument. Sometimes starting your paper again (cutting and pasting in the useful bits of information from your first version as necessary) is the best route in such cases. If the criticism you’ve received suggests that your data is either insufficient or unconvincing, or your experiments or means of analysis are flawed, or necessary controls are inadequate or absent, you’ll need to reflect on the nature of your methodology and results. Sometimes presenting the material differently can make a great difference, but this sort of criticism is an indication that you may need to repeat or restructure basic elements of your research. PARt III: commUnIcAtIng wItH JoURnAl edItoRs: sUBmIssIon, AccePtAnce, RevIsIon And ReJectIon