So in this post I’ve decided to berate the academic community for doing it wrong in peer review. Which is a large statement for someone who is not an academic.
But the thing is, while contemplating politeness in the academic sphere because reasons, I came across a study of the discourse of peer review by the excellent Professor Brian Paltridge and was horrified.

Photo by Chris Boland on Unsplash
My constructive criticism credentials
Some background about me is relevant at this point. I have been a CELTA (or CELTA-analogue) trainer for the last twenty years.* I’ve run well over 100 courses at this point**, and I worked out a while back that I have watched and – and this is the important bit – given feedback on over 500 online lessons (and climbing), and therefore far far far FAR more offline ones.
CELTA***, for the uninitiated, is a teaching boot camp originally designed to take people who have never taught before, let alone taught a language, and get them classroom ready as English teachers in four weeks.
Because teaching is a lot harder than that basic premise suggests, this is not necessarily a straightforward thing to do. Especially when many of the people on the course have an excellent practical grasp but an almost non-existent theoretical grasp of the subject they are teaching (aka, they are native speakers of English).
To complicate matters, I have also worked in a context where the people doing the course are generally not, in fact, newbies. To learning a language, to learning English to an excellent level, to understanding how language works, or to teaching.
Why do they do this course then? They are generally there for the opportunity to have the car of their teaching stripped down and put back together with the latest parts, cleaner, with no rust, and working even more efficiently than before.
And the internationally recognised certificate. Which is important because on CELTA there are grades. Guess which grades experienced teachers would prefer to get?
The importance of feedback
Add in the fact that this all costs a reasonable chunk of money, and that the main assessment is done not via marking essays or an exam but by watching and grading lessons, being a qualification that is designed to show you know how to teach not just about teaching, and hopefully you can see that my main role in course participants’ progress and ultimate success is trying to give clear but constructive feedback in a high stakes and often pressurized environment to somewhat stressed out people who need it so they can continue to advance and / or meet the necessary requirements of the course.****
Now, am I good at giving constructive feedback? Not for me to say. Ask the graduates of the courses I have run.
But I certainly have opinions about it, which brings me back to peer review for academic journals, where it seems to me, if Brian Paltridge’s research is to be believed, that some academics are very bad at it.
What is peer review?
Just in case, let’s review what we, or rather I, know about peer review to check that we, or rather I, have the basics down.
Academic journals, which is where academics publish a lot of their research findings, do not just take an academic’s word for it that everything they say in their paper is gold, and that their experiments and other studies have been exhaustively and properly conducted. No, they ask other academics from the same field to review and give feedback on what has been submitted before releasing said article on the world. I think the standard is to have at least two such reviewers, and that the reviews are usually anonymous, to better allow the peers to say what they really think.
Academia is a small world really.
Types of review
I daresay different journals might have different categories of grading, but let’s say that a typical overall response might be:
- accept
- accept with minor revisions
- accept with major revisons
- reject
Add to this the idea that there is a lot of pressure to publish in the academic world, and so a lot of submissions, and journals can afford to be picky and, to be fair, the whole of the academic world wants the publicly displayed research results to be correct and robust.
Peer review is, therefore, famously fierce. Negative comments far, far outweigh positive ones. Particularly, for some reason, if you are reviewer 2.

Now, I do not have a problem with this as such. Academia should be rigorous. It is about putting your ideas to the test, to the most stringent tests, and coming out the other side with something worth saying. And even if it is already pretty good, why not strive to make it as good as possible? Academic excellence rests on this.
What I do have a problem with is the wording of some of the comments.
The problem – too much hedging is unclear and / or rude
I appreciate that peer review is a different context to giving feedback to teachers about their lessons on a CELTA course, which is built around the idea of continuous professional development, with lessons and the lessons learned from delivering them building on one another. The teachers I work with and I are not trying to get one lesson to the highest standard possible, making people revise it, repeat it and polish it until it is.
For example, I would prefer a better balance of criticism to positive comments than the statistics provided by Professor Paltridge suggest, but I do appreciate that that is perhaps driven by this difference*****. So I am going to take what I would normally see as a demotivating and overwhelming imbalance and allow it.
Or I would if clearly peer reviewers didn’t seem to be at least as aware as I am of the likely effect of 700 negative comments and one vague positive. Sadly, what seems to happen more often than it should is that they retreat into polite obsteusification in order to try to put their suggestions in the least offensive way possible.
Except for the ones who are just using politeness as to be breathtakingly rude. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, because the point about politeness in an English speaking world is that it needs to match the context. Overdoing the politeness levels is generally a sign that you are really very cross, and using politeness as a weapon.
Examples of infelicitous wording
Here are some of the things peer reviewers said, as quoted in Brian Partridge’s book. I have slightly edited them because I wanted them to stand alone for one of the exercises for academics Paltridge suggests in his book, which is to ask potentially bemused paper writers if they can identify what the reviewer wants, which items are urgent, and which can be ignored.
See what you think. Also, can you spot the politeness strategies being used (or possibly abused)?
- If one claims to present an overview of the main approaches to genre analysis, one should not reduce existing approaches to genre analysis to justify these approaches.
- Is it really necessary to present the methodology section in such detail?
- The author may wish to pay heed to some of the suggestions found in Lewis (1999) concerning the content of certain courses.
- Some proofreading to remove infelicitous wording is probably needed.
- I wondered if the author could expand a little on the benefits of students engaging in simulations.
- It would be worth citing a more recent volume.
- Research question 1 has not been dealt with in the paper.
- Below are some references to intercultural communication I suggest the author familiarizes themselves with.
- Consider making a brief reference somewhere in the paper to David Russell’s Activity theory.
- I would recommend that the authors revise this to focus on using a slightly more formal register.
Rudeness
That first one was received by Professor Brian Paltridge himself. I can see two possible explanations for it.
Either the reviewer was actively being as nasty as they possibly could and using the anonymity of peer review to really let fly, or they were so intimidated by feeling they needed to criticise such an illustrious figure as Brian Paltridge, Professor of TESOL, University of Sydney, who has (I quote his Sydney Uni bio) “published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, and written books and book chapters for leading academic publishers” and is ” included in Stanford University list of the world’s top 2% most influential researchers”****** that they freaked out and overdid it. It’s just too hedged.
Some of the others are iffy too. Looking at you ‘infelicitous wording’ and ‘slightly more formal’.
Honestly. </eyeroll>
I would suggest that what is actually rude in academia to assume that your reader is such a bad academic that they cannot take a bit of robust dialogue. Sugar coating it implies that have something to be embarrassed about, which in my non academic opinion anyone who has spent all that time putting together something they offer for publication, decidedly does not.
Knowledge is queen.
Lack of clarity
However, regardless of whether or not these are examples of academics trying to start a fight with each other, when I gave this list to some non-native but very competent speakers of English they did not realise that in fact all the suggestions were not suggestions, but something the writer expected to be fixed.
Now, I will admit that giving people a list and asking them to say which are important does rather push people into assuming some of them are not. Welcome to my training seminars. Look, it gets people’s attention.
But this is mirrored in Paltridge’s book by what I assume is a statistically significant sample of reviewers expressing surprise when they got the revised versions of the paper where an insufficient number of the comments they made had been addressed.
Mmmmmmmmm. How did that come about, I wonder?
Even more than the potential rudeness in the more hedged comments, I am offended by the lack of clarity.
Improving peer review comments
So I came up with a set of suggestions, because you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you absolutely cannot stop her from trying to fix bad communication strategies.
I am open to being told why this is not appropriate, but I will absolutely be mentally firing into the sun anyone using the impersonal ‘one’ to make their criticism, saying what is wrong without telling me how to fix it, asking a pointed question instead of anything more helpful, or presenting something as a choice when it is not. Or using the word infelicitous.
Bearing in mind there might be online forms to fill in, of course. I can’t control the forms.*******
Strengths
Start with some positives:
- An overall summarising comment (This was overall an interesting read)
- Include specific praise (The idea about …. was genuinely original, and the whole paper was well written and easy to follow).
To work on
Introduce the constructive criticism section clearly:
- Here are my suggestions for improvement
- The following areas will all need to be addressed
Tell the author directly what to do using imperatives.
Explaining why in addition to this is useful. Even if you think it is obvious, it is one of those interesting psychological quirks that giving a reason (any reason really) is helpful in getting people to do what you want.
It also still allows you to say what the problem was in a way that does not distract from the main point (how to fix it) or annoy and / or upset people (because it is negatively commenting on their darling). Avoid just telling people what was wrong.
- Expand the section on the benefits of simulations by… in order to strengthen the argument in this section
- Include citations to more recent research such as… so as to avoid the appearance of having missed something
- Cut down on the amount of detail in the methodology section by removing… because it’s a standard procedure and the reader can then get to the meat of the paper more quickly
Suggestions
Only be more indirect in the suggestion if it is truly a suggestion not an expectation. It’s still a good idea to say why, and bury any direct criticism in the explanation. Putting this in a whole different section would help too.
- Consider reworking the title to the methodology section to remove the allusion to Pterry in case it confuses rather than amuses
End on a positive note
Finish with encouragement if you cannot really add more praise (or have both):
- I hope the author is not daunted by the amount of work needed here, and I look forward to reading the revised paper
- I wish to reiterate my opinion that this is very much a worthwhile topic and that the paper is along the right lines, and I look forward to reading the revised version
I await feedback.
Further reading
Paltridge, B. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Springer.
Footnotes. Yes I do know there is a proper footnote function on WordPress. This is funnier. We all still miss Terry Pratchett, right? Look, I’m not giving feedback in peer review here. I can have my little joke.
*Good grief.
**Probably. I’ve lost count. Close to that though. Might be more!
*** Or analogues to CELTA, as othercoursesdoexist, but only if they include at least 6 hours of assessed teaching, and preferably at least three times that of peer observation plus a significant amount of collaborative planning.
**** Depending on whether you see the course as useful or a hoop jumping exercise. Both. Can’t it be both?
***** To be honest, I do not believe this at all. Positive feedback is necessary to balance out any kind of constructive criticism. See this post about politeness for why. Plus, pointing out what people do well, as well as being psychologically helpful, is actually part of the usefulness of feedback – it’s not always obvious to the recipient what they have done well or why, and if you want the good things to keep happening, or in the context of peer review, for this to stay when something is revised, this is important flag up. However, baby steps, baby steps.
****** Although this may be a comment he received earlier in his career. It stuck with him enough for him to highlight it in his book though.
******* Do these need revising? I do enjoy fiddling with forms to try to make them produce better results. This is not a joke. I really do.