A Reviewer Said to Improve the English of My Paper. Now What?

This is what decoding looks like. In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts, the "improve the English" comment almost always traces to one of three patterns, and each points to a different fix.

The first is the systematic-error pattern. Articles, prepositions, verb tenses, and singular/plural agreement are off in a consistent way, and the errors accumulate until they tax the reader. What we see is that this is the one case where the comment is literally about grammar, and a strong language edit, or a native-fluent colleague, genuinely solves it. If your draft has this pattern, professional editing is money well spent.

The second is the overloaded-sentence pattern. Every sentence is grammatically correct, but each one carries two or three ideas, runs past forty words, and forces the reader to hold too much at once. Reviewers experience this as "bad English" and label it that way, but no grammar edit fixes it. The fix is to cut each long sentence into two or three, one idea apiece, which is something you can do yourself and which helps more than any polish.

The third is the structure-proxy pattern. The sentences are fine and the paragraphs are fine, but the results have no order, the argument doubles back, and the reader cannot find the thread. "Improve the English" is here a polite stand-in for "I got lost." In practice it means the work is reorganization, not language: lead each paragraph with its point, order the results as a narrative, and signpost the logic. A language editor will not catch this, because there is nothing ungrammatical to catch.

Only the first of the three is solved by the fix everyone reaches for first. The other two are solved by work you can largely do yourself, which is the good news buried in an annoying comment.

Once you know which pattern you have, the response is straightforward, and the table below pairs each with its fix.

Manusights pre-submission guidance on language-and-clarity comments.

The costly mistake is applying the first row's fix to the second or third row's problem. A grammar edit on a structure problem is the single most common way authors spend money and still get the same comment on resubmission.

Run this quick self-check before deciding anything. Read three paragraphs of your paper aloud, and use what trips you up to place the pattern.

Manusights read-aloud diagnostic for language-and-clarity comments.

Most papers have some of all three, but one usually dominates, and that is the one the reviewer reacted to.

A second, harder test: give the flagged section to a colleague who was not involved in the work and ask them to tell you back what it says. Where they hesitate or get it wrong is where the reviewer struggled too. This is worth more than any automated grammar score, because it measures the thing the reviewer actually measured, which is whether a reader can follow you.

When you resubmit, do the work and then say what you did, specifically. A reviewer who flagged the language once will not be reassured by a vague line that you "have improved the English throughout." Name the concrete steps: that you had the manuscript professionally edited, if you did; that you shortened long sentences and split dense paragraphs; that you reorganized the results for a clearer through-line. Specificity signals that you diagnosed the problem rather than waved at it.

Do the work if: the comment names real, recurring errors; multiple readers get lost in the same places; or the section genuinely reads as three ideas per sentence. Fix the pattern you actually have, then document it in the response.

Push back gently if: the language is clean by independent read, the errors the reviewer cites are not actually errors, or the objection is doing work that a structural fix already addressed. Even then, the winning move is usually to tighten the prose anyway so the objection has nowhere to land, and to say calmly in the response why you believe the language now meets the bar.

Clearing a language comment rarely goes to whoever spent the most on editing. It goes to whoever worked out which of the three patterns they had and fixed that one, be it a grammar edit, a sentence-splitting pass, or a reorganization. Come back to this page when a reviewer flags your English and you are deciding what to actually change before you submit again. The language-cost research we reviewed, including Amano and colleagues, is cited below. If you want the language and structure read before a reviewer sees them, our pre-submission review flags the overloaded sentences and lost threads that a grammar check misses, and if you are also worried the same clean-up could read as machine-written, the companion guide on whether your paper will be flagged as AI-written covers that separate fear.