Ok folks, I just read possibly the worst paper I've ever had the misfortune of being asked to peer-review. To the editor who sent it to me ... you really don't like me, do you?  Anyways, here we go ...

1. Don't misspell the word "abstract". I mean, after the cover page, it's the first word on the first page! It's the first thing I read, and when I see that you spelled that word wrong, I am going to automatically assume that there are other misspellings. For you, the manuscript author, this is a bad thing (see #2).

2. I can understand grammatical errors, especially for foreign authors. It happens, and I realize the English language can be complex and hard to figure out. I make grammatical mistakes myself from time to time (I tend to misuse "that" and "which"). However, there is no excuse for spelling errors. Just about every program designed for document generation has a spell checker. If you can't be bothered to take the 10 seconds to spell check, I am going to assume that you are lazy.  Lazy is bad, because if you can't be bothered to check the manuscript, what makes me think you bothered to properly design your experiments? That you paid attention to detail ... that you gave a crap about any of the science? It's a rhetorical question because the answer is none. I have no assurance, because what I know about you is that you are lazy.

3. To my current review victim ... I can see what you did, and I can add up how much this study cost you. With all your reagents, it would cost me no more than $400 to do what you've done. Now, money should not be the sole issue that dictates whether I should look favorably on your study or not but consider this. The first method you used to cull your clones for sequencing was a good idea. Problem is, you picked less than three dozen clones to look at to begin with. You could have sequenced the whole darn kit-n-kaboodle at this rate and not bothered with the screen, and probably saved yourself some change. Also, the point for you to do screenings is that you can then get a feel for your OTU's (since this was an ecology paper). The point of figuring out your OTU's is to know if you've sampled enough and captured a good portion of the diversity. I could tell you without looking at the rarefaction curve that with less than three dozen clones you most likely wouldn't have exhausted the samples diversity, but it'd be nice to have confirmation. Doing that curve would have saved your hide! Like I said ... lazy. Heck, you can do that darn analysis in Excel!

4. Just because you found a dozen clones does not mean the gene is abundant in your environment. Are you crazy?!?

5. If you want to show only three figures, don't show me figures which only raise more questions ... like why did you ignore those three other bands on that gel? What the heck are they, do you even care? Lazy, lazy, lazy.

6. A paper, double-spaced at that, that weighs in at four pages of actual text is probably not going to be worth a damn.

7. Am I the only one that gets papers to review where the line numbers are skewed and don't actually seem to line up with the actual text? Who should I be mad at when this happens? The authors or the journal?