teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

Rebuttals fail in two directions and both lose the paper. Defensive letters argue with the reviewer and get rejected by an editor who reads tone before substance. Capitulating letters accept every point including the wrong ones, and produce a worse paper that still gets rejected — because a reviewer who was mistaken and got agreement now knows the authors were not paying attention. The skill is holding a position with evidence while being genuinely easy to work with.

This lesson pairs with your course structure directly: you receive a referee report on Report Draft 1 and respond to it in Report Draft 2.

External material

None worth assigning. Published advice on this is mostly anecdote.

Governing part

None.

The mechanic

One table. Every reviewer point gets a row — including the ones you reject.

| Reviewer point | Response | Change made | Location | |—|—|—|—|

Three rules that do the work:

• Every point gets a row. A point you skip reads as a point you could not answer.
• Every change is located by section or line number in the revised manuscript. “We have clarified this” without a location makes the editor go looking, and editors do not go looking.
• At least one reasoned disagreement. If you agreed with everything, either you got an unusually good review or you were not reading. Disagreement is stated as evidence, not as apology: “We retained the original formulation because [reason]; we have added a note at §3.1 making the assumption explicit.”

Tone check before submitting: no apology that is not attached to a change. “We thank the reviewer” once at the top is enough.

Deliverable

PDF response letter.

Competency check

• Every reviewer point has a row
• Every claimed change is located by section or line
• At least one point respectfully declined, with a reason rather than an apology
• The revised draft actually contains the changes claimed — spot-checked against three rows
• No unattached apologies

Turning it in

This replaces your writing entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WW assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: the point you disagreed with, and whether you still think you were right.
• You hand in: A PDF letter built on a table — reviewer point / your response / the change made / exactly where it is in the revision — with every point given a row

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M5 are done, submit the M5 — The Review Cycle assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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