The Peer Review Rebuttal
Yielding where persuaded, holding firm where the evidence requires
We thank the two reviewers for their careful and, in the main, engagement with our manuscript.
Their comments have materially improved the paper, and we have adopted the majority of their suggestions without reservation.
On a small number of points, however, we find ourselves respectfully , and we set out our reasoning below in the hope that it will clarify rather than merely resist.
Reviewer 1 objects that our sample, drawn from a single discipline, cannot support conclusions about academic writing as a whole.
This is a fair caution, and we have accordingly narrowed our claims and retitled the paper to the disciplinary scope.
We would gently observe, nonetheless, that no study of language can escape the particular, and that the reviewer's counsel, taken to its limit, would forbid all generalisation whatsoever.
We have therefore qualified, but not surrendered, the broader implications sketched in our conclusion.
Reviewer 2 raises a more fundamental concern, contending that our central category, evasive hedging, is insufficiently distinguished from ordinary scholarly caution.
We take this objection seriously, for it touches the argument at its foundation.
Yet we believe the distinction survives , provided one attends, as we now do more explicitly, to the placement of the hedge relative to the claim's evidential support.
Where caution accompanies weak evidence, it is candid; where it accompanies strong evidence, it is, we argue, doing other work.
The reviewer is right that we stated this too briskly, and we have added a paragraph, and two examples, to earn the distinction rather than merely to assert it.
On one matter we must, with some regret, decline the proposed revision entirely.
Reviewer 2 suggests that we remove the final section, in which we turn the analysis upon our own prose.
That section, we are told, is self-indulgent and tonally discordant with a research article.
We understand the objection and have felt its force in our own drafting.
But the turn is not ornamental; it is the argument's necessary consequence, and to it would be to exempt ourselves from the very standard we apply to others.
We have, in to the reviewer, shortened the section and stripped it of its more lyrical excesses.
Its substance, however, we must keep, and we hope the editor will agree that intellectual consistency here outweighs generic .
Several smaller points we accept gratefully and without argument.
The mislabelled figure, the untranslated German , the overlong footnote on page nine: all are corrected, and we are embarrassed to have let them stand.
We are conscious, throughout, that the anonymity of this exchange is a courtesy and not a licence.
It permits on both sides, and we have tried to answer with rather than with the wounded pride that these encounters too often provoke.
If our tone has anywhere hardened, we ask the reviewers to attribute it to conviction and not to .
A paper, like an argument, is improved by resistance, and we are the better for having been made to defend what we had merely assumed.
We have, in sum, revised generously where persuaded and held firm where the evidence, as we read it, requires.
To on everything would be as intellectually dishonest as to on nothing.
The judgement of where to stand is itself, we would suggest, a decision about how much of the truth one is prepared to be answerable for.
We submit the revised manuscript in that spirit, and remain grateful to the reviewers whose it has survived and, we hope, honoured.
Whatever the editor decides, the paper is now a truer account of what we found, and a more careful one of what we did not.