After submitting a manuscript to a scholarly journal and receiving comments from the reviewers and/or journal editor, authors are often asked to revise their manuscripts to address the comments provided. While authors typically have no problem responding to the comments from a scientific or academic perspective, they can sometimes find it difficult to decide upon the most effective way to respond.

By "effective" here, we mean presenting responses in English (i) in an organized manner and (ii) in a balanced and collegial tone; or, turned on its head, presenting responses that do not waste the journal editor's or reviewers' time by being poorly organized, unnecessarily wordy, or inappropriately phrased.