(My scientist and academician friends may identify with this. The original source may have been someone named Ray Baumeister.)
Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:
Enclosed is our latest version of MS# 85-02-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the
re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again
rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed
the &%$#$! running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to
satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.
I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change
we made in response to the critiques. After all, its fairly clear that
your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure
than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations
by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of
tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall
into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic
psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending
them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably
be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from
this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request
that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have
mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being
reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review
process could be unduly delayed.
Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For
example, if (as reviewer C suggested) several of my recent ancestors
were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that.
Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved
and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5
pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering
the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller
typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.
One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions # 13-28 by Reviewer
B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews
before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that
he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of
different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we
could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a
high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16
were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly
admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have
modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant
literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that
discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more
asinine suggestions in the other reviews.
We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally
recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not,
then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human
decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from
be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it,
however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout
this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly
insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts
for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers
submits to your journal.
Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote
acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we
liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it, but you held
the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us chop, reshuffle,
restate, hedge expand, shorten, and in general covert a meaty paper into
stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't or wouldn't have done it without
your input.
Sincerely,
