Above we saw snippets of wording from Development Letters. Here follows a specimen (example) development letter. It gives you an example of the wording of a real development letter that is both supportive (in wording) and touch (requiring substantial but do-able improvements).

The ad hoc board of reviewers and I enjoyed reading your submission and want to work with you to get it into a publishable state. As strong as this draft is, I need for you to improve it in several areas before acceptance for publication. Your published paper will be read and cited for decades so let’s spend a few more hours on it.

With this in mind, please consider the following suggestions. While I do not require that your revised paper accept all these suggestions in the next revision, I do require that you upload a ‘revisions document’ in addition to your revised paper. In the revision document, show how your revised paper addresses and responds to each of the following suggestion. Do this point by point for each of the following suggestions:

  1. I recommend condensing the Abstract. The abstract is a precise summary of the paper, and its purpose is to provide the reader with a preview of the contents. Aim for 1-2 sentences for each section of the Abstract.
  2. I suggest strengthening the literature review to show how this paper builds on prior research. For this and any other topic, I recommend using the ISI full-text search engine at http://ISJournals.org to see if there are other papers published in this or other ISI journals related to the topic. All papers found here are available online for free, so this is a very useful tool.
  3. Here are some other papers that relate to this paper’s topic for you to consider as you strengthen the literature review:
    1. [the development letter included 11 current papers on the topic, but they are omitted from this sample letter]
  4. I highly suggest hiring a copyeditor to polish the grammar and spelling in your next draft. While your paper has much merit, we can publish it only after you fix the grammar and spelling. Here are examples of errors from the first couple of pages. As these are just examples, your revised paper needs to be copyedited by someone capable of catching errors throughout your next draft.
    1. [the development letter included 12 examples of problems in the first few pages]
  5. The copy editor can likely also help you to reduce the paper’s length. Your paper will be stronger after vigorous editing to slash unnecessary verbiage. Good research papers for this journal are concise, just long enough to make their point.
  6. I recommend solving the methodological problem of multiple, and possibly, confounding variables in the study. The research would be improved by controlling some of the loose variables, such as the class size, or the time that the class was offered, and adding the format of the courses where the evaluations were conducted. Or it might be possible to state why these variables were excluded from the study.
  7. Your revision should make it clear:
    1. Whether the courses were online, hybrid or in person, or if just the evaluations moved from being in person to an online platform.
    2. Were the students given an incentive to complete the evaluations in either format?
    3. Were the students guaranteed anonymity and privacy?
    4. That this is a pilot study and that the results may not be generalizable to other institutions.
  8. Please consider adding graphics (with captions) since they will improve the readability of your paper. 
  9. The Discussion section could be expanded to include more interpretation of the results and relate the findings back to the literature discussed in the Literature Review section.
  10. The conclusion of this paper would be improved by adding a Conclusion section, even if it is just 5 or 6 sentences long.
  11. Check that references conform to APA style. A style guide can be downloaded from https://help.Informingscience.org/APA