Reflections on Reading the Proof for APJE

I write now to capture the immediate and most honest reactions.

I was appalled by my writing style in the first half of the paper, where I synthesized literature. I finally understood what one reviewer meant when he said, "I know what this and that guy think, but what do YOU think?" I realized in the flurry of quotation marks and my concern with rightly attributing everything to someone, I lost my voice. My friends who read my draft gave me similar feedback that the style was really bad. I was too deep into that process and too cluttered in my mind at that point to have made stylistic changes. So yes, that is evidence of amateurish writing. It is very amateurish indeed.

But when I got to the second part of the article where I am less concerned with citation and attribution, but could use my own words with ease, I wrote well. I wrote clear. I heard Shuyi's voice. I know it's my voice when I use "cute" words. I am not a very good English speaker or someone with a lot of vocabulary, so I use "cute" words to express my emotions. I love it. I can recognize Shuyi's voice. It's cute. :) And I felt I rightly highlighted the teachers' teaching style, while protecting them, by saying how sensitive they were and when they were critical, it was only out of love for the country. These two are my favourite teachers. I really think they are the most awesome teachers I've ever met.

So there you go. I have some work to do, to figure out all the Author's Queries (AQ) and how to input into the paper these corrections. Let's see how it goes now.