This is just to say
we have rejected
the poems you sent us

even though you liked them
we got some other poems we
liked better
far more juicy
far more sweet

Not surprisingly, people wrote back to express their outrage at being rejected with such glee.

The worst rejection I ever got was when someone took a magic marker and simply scrawled “why?” on the first page of a story and returned it to me. I will never submit to that journal again.

as a writer, i expect to get form rejections. but i haven’t submitted many pieces in my life.

Within reason, of course. About 25% of the reason Popcorn Popping ground to a halt was that we were trying to provide substantive, individualized feedback to every submission.

I sent a form email. Our submissions were by email, and my rejections were by email. All I did was type in a different date, name and article title.

I didn’t have time for anything else. We had a ton of submissions. Usually people were surprised I responded at all.

Which taught me the lesson, once again, that “perfect” is the enemy of “good enough.” If you bother to respond, you’ll be ahead of expectations already.

If you are trying to be sensitive and provide constructive feedback, you’re in the wrong job. You’re not a friend, you’re not a counselor, you’re not a grammar teacher. If their sad about rejection, they can go cry on a friend’s shoulder. Your sympathy doesn’t add much to the equation. If their article sucks, they can either find someone to tell them so, or they can fail in life. It happens. People fail. Tough beans.

In fact, I would suggest that part of the reason your rejection letters are always late is probably because you are over-inflating what is supposed to go into one. You’ve blown this process of writing rejections into something so demanding of your care and concern that your mind is subconsciously rebelling by procrastinating the task.

The task, as you’ve painted it, is unmanageable. Your mind knows this, and procrastination is its way of telling you so.

Save a sample rejection email to your email “drafts” folder and go spend time on other things that matter more.

Unless something would be accepted if specific mechanical changes were made (length, move footnotes to endnotes, whatever), I don’t want editorial feedback, either. You can’t trust editorial feedback even when it is sincerely offered, because too much useless flattery masquerading as editorial feedback has gone out to know what to trust and what to reject.

I especially don’t want suggestions from anonymous peer reviewers. They review the article they wanted to read, not the one you submitted. Half of them give orders to make it longer, greener, and sweeter, and the other half give explicit directions to make it shorter, redder, and tarter.

So I’m an easy letter — or I would be, if I submitted anything anywhere. Just give me thumbs up or thumbs down. And do it in a timely manner.

Jacob–it’s a little different for Dialogue because of the varied types of content and the peer review process. It happens often that I have to evaluate an article about a topic where I really don’t have sufficient expertise (hard to believe, I know!!), and then I’m at the mercy of reviewers. If the initial reviewers are sharply divided, I’ll send it out to another referee or two, and that just takes a long time. The things I know I’m going to reject tend to get letters more quickly.

Also, I tend to send authors most or all of the reviewers’ comments (though I will occasionally pretty them up). You’d be surprised at how often people get really angry and want to tell me all about how unfair and stupid and wrong and mean the reviewer was–skin thickness seems to be a highly variable characteristic