Many academic writers battle chronic perfectionism. They struggle with knowing when to stop editing a paper and just turn it in. In a professional context where firm deadlines are few and often quite distant (the tenure track is 6 years, after all), the urge to do one more conference, one more pass through the data for quotes, one more round of edits, one more robustness check, one more pass for polishing the prose, can be nearly insurmountable.
Unfortunately, this urge is quite problematic. Our careers and successes are measured in outputs – papers/books published – not inputs like hours spent writing and editing. In today’s highly competitive academic environment, publication outputs are more important than ever, even at the pre-PhD stage. Indeed, one of the things hiring committees learn from a candidate who has published already is that the individual knows when to stop editing and submit.
So how do we know it’s time to stop editing? I generally rely on the same rule we use for qualitative data collection: saturation. When the editing work is no longer moving the project forward in any meaningful manner, it’s time to stop. Moving commas and semicolons is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: no one can see you doing it and no one really cares anyway. Unless your prose is excruciatingly painful, no reviewer will recommend rejecting an article because of writing issues. A missed comma or period, or even a typo or two, will not be fatal, nor will a comma splice or even a lone sentence fragment. The same goes for malformatted citations and the kinds of wording quirks that multilingual writers experience.
This saturation approach is very different than the mindset of quantitative data collection, where a missing data point on a single variable costs us the entire observation from our analysis. In this mindset, the urge to Not Miss Anything can often be strongest. Our goal has to be “Good Enough,” not perfect. The whole point of sending it out is to get feedback, meaning that further revisions are almost certainly going to be required. Probably one of the best changes in the journal environment in the last decade is editors setting deadlines for the return of revise and resubmit decisions, because it prevents endless revision. And even if you do somehow magically get an immediate accept – one journal in political science reports not a single one in 16+ years – you still get a professional copyedit to help take care of any lingering things you miss.
You have to ask yourself a very difficult question: Is my work now adding value to the paper? If no, then ask a colleague to give it a quick once-over and send it off. We become blind to our own errors and typos after too long staring at the same document anyway, so let someone else be the typo police for the final skim. What is important is getting it out, not getting it perfect – there is no such thing as perfect. Get it out and move on. I promise, you’ll get a chance to fix things later.