Academic English revision

Reviewer Says 'Please Clarify' — Your Response Is Already Wrong

When a reviewer writes 'unclear' or 'please clarify,' they are not flagging your grammar — they are flagging a broken logical chain. Your response must name the break and show the repair.

A reviewer writes "the writing in Section 3 is unclear" or "please clarify this paragraph." What do you do? You run it through Grammarly, tweak a few sentences, and in your response letter write: "We have improved the language throughout the manuscript." That single sentence tells the editor you did not understand the comment. It will not save your paper. It might get you rejected without resubmission.

Here is the distinction that every non-native writer needs to internalise: "unclear" and "grammatically incorrect" are different complaints. If a reviewer wants grammar fixes, they write "please correct grammatical errors" or "the manuscript contains typos." When they write "unclear," they mean: I cannot follow your reasoning here. You jumped somewhere. You assumed a step you never justified. This is a structural problem. Running it through a language tool fixes nothing.

Your first move is decomposition. Take the vague complaint and turn it into specific sub-problems: does this paragraph lack a topic sentence? Is there a missing logical bridge between two claims? Did you introduce a term without defining it? Did you present a conclusion without the intermediate step that makes it hold? Until you can point at the exact sentence where the reasoning broke, you cannot fix it — and you cannot write a response that convinces anyone you tried.

Now look at two response patterns. ❌ "We have revised Section 3 to improve clarity." ✅ "The reviewer noted that the causal chain in paragraph 2 of Section 3 was unclear. Our original text moved directly from [mechanism A] to [outcome C] without stating the intermediate step [B]. We now state mechanism B explicitly at sentence 2 and provide a two-sentence justification for why A produces B before presenting C." Do you see the difference? The second response shows you know where the gap was and how you closed it. That is what gets papers accepted.

One more: ❌ "We apologize for the unclear writing. We have carefully reviewed the manuscript." ✅ "The reviewer flagged the transition between the methodology and results subsections as unclear. We had originally compressed three distinct experimental conditions into a single paragraph. We now separate them with labeled sub-headings and add a one-sentence rationale before each condition explaining why it was included in the design." The pattern is always the same: name the specific problem → describe what was originally happening → state the structural change you made. The screenshot-worthy line here is: **A reviewer is not rejecting your English. They are rejecting your invisible assumptions.**

Do language issues ever contribute? Sure. Sentences with four subordinate clauses, subjects buried three phrases deep, nominalisations stacked on nominalisations — those make even solid logic feel opaque. But the fix is not a grammar checker. The fix is splitting one sentence into two. Replacing abstractions with verbs. Putting the agent back in the subject position where the journal allows it. I do this in two passes: first I rewrite structure by hand, then I run the result through easydue for surface-level naturalness. The order matters — polishing language on a broken structure is wasted effort.

The emotional reality, though, matters too. Being told your writing is "unclear" hits different when English is your second language. It feels like a verdict on your competence. It is not. What is happening is that your thinking pattern left gaps that a native reader fills automatically — and a reviewer cannot fill them either. You do not need to sound native. You need to learn where your thinking leaves holes and close them explicitly. That skill is what separates "desk reject" from "minor revision." And it is learnable.