AUTHORS: What's one piece of advice you'd give law review editors about how to improve?

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Posted by Elli Olson, community karma 677
Hi authors! I have another question for anyone kind enough to answer:

What is one piece of advice you would give to a new board to help them improve their law review?

Right now most boards are brand new or about to be. In my experience new editors usually are looking for a way they can improve their publication, and my team is trying to gather some information that we can share with new boards.

Since authors are such an important part of law reviews, I thought some of you might have good pointers for new boards. Any responses you can offer (anecdotes about good and bad experiences you've had with law reviews in the past would be especially interesting) are much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Elli

1 Comment

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Carol Pauli, community karma 4127
Hi,
I have enjoyed working with editors who red-lined my article--letting me see all of the changes that were made and even citing the Bluebook or other authority for each edit.  Some changes clarified a passage or made it more graceful.  How nice!  (I felt bad when a poor hardworking student repeatedly had to correct and cite authority for a recurring citation comma mistake of mine!)

Two things I have seen others groan about:
1. Receiving an edited version of an article without any indication of the changes that were made. That required colleagues of mine to run the articles through "compare documents"--a chore.
2. Seeing verbs changed from passive to active voice because of a rigid policy, even though the resulting sentence was hard to follow or even nonsensical.

I hope this feedback is the sort of thing you wanted. Thanks for asking!




about 8 years ago
Carol -- This is exactly the type of feedback I was hoping for, thank you so much for sharing!
Elli Olson – about 8 years ago
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