Advice columns of edited research articles: academic writing tips and comments of Iranian EFL teacher convenience editors to authors in medical sciences

Background & Aims: Increasing pressure for having scholarly publications in accredited English medium journals emphasizes the need to enhance academic writing ability by author-researchers in various fields, especially, in medical and hard sciences. In order to enhance the language of manuscripts, many authors seek assistance from editors prior to submission to high-status journals. Various types of editing assistance are provided by English teachers who act as convenience editors through a range of editing strategies. One of these strategies is putting consulting comments on authors' Manuscripts (MSs) to provide them with necessary explanations when there is a frequent or serious inaccuracy in the manuscript. This teaching-based study aimed at tapping a very underexplored area of the types of consulting comments Iranian author-researchers receive from English teacher editors in the process of manuscript editing. In this way, it is possible to find out the main language-related or academic writing-oriented problematic areas in Iranian medical and hard sciences researchers' MSs. Material & Methods: To this end, consulting notes put by five Iranian English Teacher Convenience Editors (TCEs) on thirty manuscripts written by Iranian academia in medical and hard sciences were carefully analyzed. Data coding and data analysis were done according to co-operative principles (significant aspects of and requirements for conducting a successful conversation whether in spoken or written form). Results: The findings revealed that Iranian authors' edited MSs received marginal tips and comments on ten major areas of language or academic writing. These areas were redundancy reduction, informativeness, rechecking, citation, maintaining the author's intention; consistency, relevance; orderliness, disambiguation, and structural issues. A good number of genuine problematic extracts from the corpus along with the consultation comments were provided in the results section. Moreover, the classified comments included precious teaching-based explanations in any area that editors diagnosed problems or inaccuracies. Conclusion: This study concludes that through paying more attention to these areas, Iranian authors' academic writing ability and rate of acceptance for their MSs could be improved.