My sister is a PhD and a teacher of a specialty that requires a lot of writing (I think she also teaches a writing course), so she's pretty clear on which side of any given formatting divide she falls.

I need to provide the best and simplest input to any given piece of software--that's where I fall. So I outline and style manically, I *don't* do two returns between paragraphs, instead styling that extra space in, etc.

Some science-type entertainment: how micro organisms move.

I can't explain the behavior of PhDs except to say some of us get in our own rut and don't change our habits at all ever.

That's fine, as long as your rut is grammatically correct and technically current.

Jesus, we hated getting manuscripts from PhDs.

That's about all I work with - PhDs and PhD candidates. But there's the occasional person who decided to leave academia, get a job and forgo the PhD; they're generally task-focused.

Some people, not necessarily all PhDs, are incapable of reading instructions. They do whatever is familiar and easy, and figure we'll work it out. And of course we do. We send a packet of instructions when the paper is accepted, and another when the proof is ready, and I send a letter myself by email, that I wrote to address all the common questions my authors have. My favorite was the guy to responded to that email with, "I don't have time to read instructions, just tell me what to do!"

Some people, not necessarily all PhDs, are incapable of reading instructions. They do whatever is familiar and easy, and figure we'll work it out. And of course we do.

Oh yeah. We had very specific author guidelines on our website (most if not all journals do), detailing style, word counts, etc. No one ever fucking read them, because things were never formatted properly and word counts were always WAY over, with 8 multipage tables to further illustrate their point.

And, like you, we always just worked it out. Which cut into our time when we could have been doing actual work instead of being their clerical staff (for which we couldn't charge them; if we were allowed to charge for corrections, people would have stopped their bullshit REALLY quickly, I tell you what). (And yes, some journals do charge for author corrections past one round of galleys. As in, they get a typeset galley and can indicate corrections, and that's fine and there is no charge. But any further corrections incur a fee. We had some authors who were horrible about changes. We had a paper with 5 or 6 authors, and only 1 author looked at the galley and returned changes. So after we put the article online, 2 co-authors lost their shit and called screaming at us that we needed to issue a retraction due to "editorial errors and negligence" [I swear this is true]. When we asked what changes of theirs got left out, they said, oh, we didn't look at the galley you sent us. O_o.) t edit (And, of course, we made their changes, but you can DAMN bet there was no "retraction due to editorial errors and negligence." But we also weren't allowed to write the correction to indicate that the authors were total fucknuts.)

You will pry my double-spaces out of my cold, dead hands, which will still be reaching for the space bar.

Legal documents. I work on legal documents. Sentences can be hugely long and contain any number of periods. That double-space can be very helpful.

No one ever fucking read them

No one ever fucking reads them. It should just say: Dear author, just send us whatever mess you threw together for the PowerPoint presentation at the conference, and we'll put together a professional journal paper for you. Because that's what's gonna happen anyway.

Steph, we are as one. Last week, an author wrote to inform me that two figures were switched in his published paper. I almost had a panic attack. Turned out, the paper had been online since APRIL and he was just noticing this, and just in time because it's going to press next week, and, he'd noted it in his original corrections as switching the CAPTIONS, which the copyeditor dutifully did even though it made no sense (sigh). Sometimes the dummies are on my team.

TCG isn't allowed to book any more conferences on a Monday. Both of the places I have called for takeout are closed today.

Oh, how about the authors who breeze right past the review deadline and then, just as the whole thing's just about done, say "I have a few changes, but we'll still get this report out on time, right?" And their "few changes" involve renumbering figures, updating the TOC, and adding a new appendix.

I always get a moment of anxiety when an author says "just a few changes!"

My greatest recurring problem is authors who think the figures are not sufficiently high resolution unless they can infinite-zoom and see no pixelation. Every info packet they've gotten (which they didn't read) has told them we use 300 or 600 dpi tiff format graphics. Now they're mad that they didn't get infinite-zoom vector graphics. Nope, you're not getting it. I'm annoyed with soothing them with detailed reasons why we use what we use. I wish I could say, you should have read the info packet(s).

Oh, my god, I always got people who wanted to use crappy graphics they'd found on the internet and didn't understand copyright or the concept of resolution.