14. Writing to the Editor
After you have completed writing your manuscript, you are now ready to submit to a journal for consideration for publication. This correspondence with the journal editor is another genre of texts.
Here is a sample of a cover letter to be enclosed with your manuscript when you send it to the editor of the journal.
<LETTERHEAD> January 10, 2000 Editor Journal of Polymer Chemical Transactions University of XXX 326 Smith Hall Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261 U.S.A. Dear Editor: I am enclosing one original and two copies of our manuscript “XXXX by YY, ZZ, AA and BB” which we would like to submit for publication as an article in the Journal of Polymer Chemical Transactions. The manuscript consists of 12 pages of text, 2 tables, 1 page of figure legends, and 3 figures. We hope that the paper will be considered suitable for publication in your journal. Sincerely yours,
Taro Tanaka XXXX Kobe University
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Very often a manuscript submitted for consideration is returned with comments from reviewers/referees with instructions to revise it. On the next page is an example of such a letter.
This is the letter which the authors wrote to send with their revised manuscript. They make a complaint to the editor. What is it and why have they done that?
<Letterhead> April 5, 1999 The Editor The Journal of Clinical Investigation The University of Michigan Room 4661, Kresge 1, Box 0560 200 Zina Pitcher Place Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0560 U.S.A. #98-5687/Y. Suzuki, K. Tanaka, N. Miyazaki: Suppression of transcription factor causes no decrease in insulin mRNA in MIN6 cells Dear Editor: We are submitting a revised version of our manuscript. The changes are described in our Responses to Reviewers. Before a final decision is made on our manuscript, we would like to express our concern about the evaluation of our manuscript by Reviewer A. It seems that Reviewer A may have some prejudice against the negative results with respect to the effects of suppression of XXX on insulin gene transcription presented in our paper. Despite the fact that there has been no report of the evaluation of XXX function as a rate-determining factor for the insulin gene transcription (before our present study), Reviewer A seems to be convinced that XXX plays a major role in determining the rate of the insulin gene transcription. We feel such prejudice can be seen in phrases used in the Full Review for Authors, such as “Unfortunately, the authors did not find any decreases in insulin...” and “This (negative result) is very disappointing and is the major drawback to this paper.” We consider that even negative results have significance if they provide useful information to understanding the molecular mechanisms for insulin gene regulation as well as glucose toxicity. Fortunately, this viewpoint seems to be supported by the other two reviewers (B and C). We would like to thank the editors and reviewers for the valuable comments to our present study and for having allowed us to revise and improve our manuscript. We hope that this manuscript is now suitable for publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Sincerely yours,
Yoshiyuki Suzuki, M.D., Ph.D.
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