Cogitate and Percolate

Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

I once was in the position to see the editing of an international research position paper; how the sausage is made, so to speak. I was able to see contributors, editing, and writing styles first hand by academics from my industry. 

What I saw was shocking.

Writer #1

I saw one writer who is a famous name in my industry who could not write their way out of a wet paper sack. Literally one paragraph that was meant to contain a definition of “immersion” contained five sentences that were the same sentence reworded. It was exactly like watching a Freshman college student open, work on a paper by writing one floppy sentence, then hitting save, put the paper away for a day, then re-open it, start again in the same paragraph and forget that they should be adding thought and simply re-work the same thought they had the day before, and then think that they were profound. The result is that they sounded like a bullshitter. Their work needed major rewriting; every sentence.

This is a doctoral holder who is director of a major research/production house with the US. [EDIT: Update from December 2025. This writer’s university is collapsing.]

Writer #2

Second, a writer who is famous — like hits the podcasts weekly for their opinions in my industry– contributed a page and a half of writing and was paid US$5,000. (Actually all three examples I give here were paid $5,000 each for their writing). It didn’t need much editing but…hey…could you sleep at night knowing you gave that kind of contribution? The final paper was 75 pages.

$5,000 for 1.5 pages of writing?

Nice work, if you can get it.

Writer #3

The last writer actually gave good writing and a decent amount of it. Unfortunately, this person does not get off completely free from problems. 

I personally tech supported the person as they were supposed to present in an admittedly difficult XR platform. They didn’t attend a rehearsal. The time of the event, their sound didn’t work. I brought them outside of the auditorium to troubleshoot. But as I went through the standard list of fixes (which all centered on the user and their Windows settings), I got a healthy heaping of sighs and “I should be inside presenting” statements. Eventually, the writer gave up on me and the tech and decided to go in on cell phone patched in.

The writer was still paid $5,000. But they had an attitude that would not fit through the door sideways.

All doctoral holders, all famous names in the industry. All unpleasant to work with, to put it mildly.

Disclosure: I contributed to the early stage of this same writing project. However, there is no proof that any of my contributions, or indeed much of any of the contributions of the 54 unpaid, early stage writers showed up in the final project other than just in name. The early contributions were supposed to be read, condensed, and included in the final version. There is absolutely no proof that actually happened. 

Even at one point, I had heard an incident that a quote attributed to an
early writer had never happened; they didn’t write/say that. That person strongly objected to the quote for obvious ethical reasons. The editors removed the mistaken attribution. 

It seems much more likely, from what I witnessed, that the three writers above plus the editors simply restarted a new document to their own preferred liking.

The further editing was a mess as editors worked with different writing programs
and had distinctly different approaches to what was acceptable academic
writing. In the end, the main editor was so disgusted by the writing
that they refused to have the document qualified as academic writing and
it was spun as a “market report” (interesting, given that it was
written entirely by academics) instead. It didn’t really work. 

The document hit the presses
more than 6 months late to little acclaim or notice.