Ugh. It's Saturday night and I'm sitting here with my laptop formatting a paper for submission to a journal. Does that make me old, lame or is it just the mark of a fifth year grad student feeling the heat? Probably all of the above.
As a youngster I never appreciated the amount of work that goes into formatting a paper for submission. As a student you only see the finished product and it's easy to be blissfully unaware of what it takes to get it there. It takes days, full eight hour days, to get a paper that is complete and ready in all other respects ready to be submitted. There are a ton of little things that must be done. Like making sure all of your p's (a commonly used statistics symbol) are all in italics and capitalized. But guess what, every journal does it differently, so in one journal it may look like this P, but in the next one it's this p, and others are simply p. This is just one example of many.
So you write the paper, you edit, you rewrite, you get feedback and rewrite and reedit. Then you polish it till it shines, and then, only then, do you get to format, and how you do that depends on where you want it to go. And when it gets rejected and you decide to send it somewhere else? Even if you change nothing about the writing you'll still spend a couple of days reformatting. And that doesn't even include the dreaded bibliography, or figures. Those two sections can suck your soul out of your eyeballs.
