The next step in the publication process for me was peer review arranged by the journal I submitted to. It is a student-run journal, so the responsibility of both arranging and executing peer review falls to students. Students have courses and exams that can take up a lot of their time, so the feedback took a while to arrive.
When it did, I was surprised how different it was from what I received from the First Draft Matchmaker folks. The journal editor provided me with a line-numbered version of my article, as well as feedback from two student peer reviewers. While both of the reviewers had general comments that applied to the entire paper, almost all of the feedback was addressed to specific lines of the manuscript, mostly discussing phrasing and styling concerns. This presented a useful complement to the higher level feedback I had received from FDM.
Since I am also a student, I too had many scheduling pressures during the semester, so I hadn’t had a chance to action any of the feedback I had received before the peer reviewers delivered. I ended up addressing all of the feedback from all four reviewers within a single process. The FDM feedback prompted me to rearrange sections and add clarifying and summary pieces throughout, and the peer feedback helped me improve the existing writing that I was moving around.
The result is a much stronger paper than what I had originally written. It has been gratifying to have people engage so thoroughly with my work, and to volunteer their time to help me improve as a writer and scholar. Having made the suggested changes, I’ve returned the manuscript to the journal editor for review. If that goes well, the next step in the process will be publication!