Dear colleague:

Once you are a grown-ass scientist with several years of experience past your PhD — which means that among other things you are not a graduate student of mine, for whose technical writing practices I am responsible and after whom I (grudgingly) accept that it is my job to clean up prior to manuscript submission lest we all be embarrassed — then pretty please with a cherry on top: 

— Don’t send me a manuscript draft in a state where it’s impossible to comprehend what a figure actually represents. What is the quantity you are plotting, for which system/sample?

— Be cognizant that someone is supposed to at least approximately be able to read stuff off your graphs, which means that a total of three ticks with numbers (with no ticks or numbers in between) on the whole goddamn axis is simply not enough.

— Read the goddamn draft before you send it to me. Go over it as you would when you review other people’s papers; notice that there are multiple places where you make pretty strong claims of “common knowledge” that’s not really common and where you don’t actually provide a citation. It pisses me off when there are 10-15 places where I felt a citation was really necessary but it’s missing.

— Read the goddamn draft before you send it to me. Pretty please decide on  the notation and don’t change it 5 times throughout the paper (because you cut and pasted from 5 different papers) and clean up the equations.  It’s not really all that hard. Really.

— Read the goddamn draft before you send it to me. You have to read it in order to realize that, in the part that you wrote, the flow is terrible. It is hypertension-inducing even in the under-caffeinated among us, and in my case a vein might pop. Edit the draft, for goodness sake, I know you can. You are not my student, I should not have to clean up so much after you. More importantly, I don’t want to. You are a grown-ass scientist.

Sincerely,

Xykademiqz