I’ve been spend­ing time writ­ing response let­ters lately. I’ve also been read­ing lots of response let­ters from authors want­ing their stuff pub­lished in the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing. I thought it might be use­ful to col­late a few thoughts on the subject.

• No grov­el­ling. I some­times get response let­ters that start off with a para­graph of inane and obse­quious fawn­ing. The real response only begins after a para­graph of flat­tery which makes me won­der why I’ve never won the Nobel prize. Authors please note: it doesn’t work. I don’t decide whether to pub­lish your paper on the basis of how many nice things you can say about me. In fact, the more ridicu­lous the state­ments, the more I sus­pect that there must be prob­lems with your paper. Just begin with some­thing like this: “Thank you for the oppor­tu­nity to revise my paper. I have com­mented below on each of the points raised by the referees.“
• Please respond to all of the major points made by the ref­er­ees. Just say­ing “We have done what the ref­er­ees asked” is insuf­fi­cient. The edi­tor wants to know what you have done. The sim­plest pro­ce­dure is to cut and paste the ref­er­ees com­ments into your response let­ter, with your com­ments inter­spersed. Use a dif­fer­ent font to make it clear what is from the ref­eree reports and what is your com­ment. That way the edi­tor does not need to switch between the ref­eree reports and your letter.
• Give page and para­graph num­bers for all the changes you have made. An edi­tor will want to check pre­cisely what you have changed, and this makes it faster to do so.
• For minor cor­rec­tions such as typos or gram­mat­i­cal issues, you can sim­ply say “I have cor­rected all of the minor errors noted by the ref­er­ees”. If the ref­eree has num­bered his/her com­ments, then give the num­bers to make it clear which cor­rec­tions you are refer­ring to.
• If you dis­agree with the ref­eree, don’t feel obliged to do what is asked. But you do need to con­vince the edi­tor that the ref­eree is incor­rect. Explain your­self care­fully and respect­fully, and any rea­son­able edi­tor will weigh up your com­ments against those of the ref­eree. Remem­ber that the ref­er­ees have been invited to com­ment because they are con­sid­ered experts in the field. So you can’t just dis­miss them as idiots. If appro­pri­ate, you might say “I am pre­pared to do as the ref­eree requests, but I think it would be bet­ter to leave it as it is for the fol­low­ing reasons…”.
• Resist the temp­ta­tion to add more than is nec­es­sary to your let­ter to the edi­tor. He or she is usu­ally very busy. Writ­ing long detailed addi­tional expla­na­tions or sub­mit­ting new sup­port­ing mate­r­ial is almost always unnec­es­sary and unwel­come. When writ­ing a response let­ter, do what you can to save the editor’s time.