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Manuscripts are unwieldy, but the real reason for that time ratio is that most of them are a fast reject. Herewith, the rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don’t publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can’t tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.

(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)

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Aside from Numbers 2 and 7, all of these mistakes are rooted in not knowing the principles of composition: grammar, punctuaction, spelling, vocabulary, and sentence structure. And yet whenever I make the claim that writers should study grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure -- or whenever I explicitly tell someone to study these things -- I'm ignored and (often) become the object of a nasty post (as I'm sure this post will elicit).

That's fine. Stay in the 60-75% range.

Ok, so I didn't actually go out and do a study, but I don't blieve that people would knowingly submit a piece with grammar or spelling errors, so logically, these people must not know their work contains grammar or spelling errors.

But it is not true of all of them. Anyone remember Infyrno? Rather unfair to single him out as an example, since he was't functionally illiterate, and we've seen plenty of other examples here. But he was, as others have been, quite proud of his rebellion against the strictures of 'rules' and 'intelligibility' and all that. I rather imagine that at least some bottom of the slushpilers are like that, deliberately rebelling against the 'conventions' and 'expectations' of the publisher.

In his book THE ART OF FICTION, John Gardner exhorts the novice writer to take a few weeks and work his way through a good freshman-level composition book and cover tundmentals as well as sharpen your basic writing skills once and for all. I've done this, and it helped me very much -- especially the section on sentence structure, which is the foundation of good, rhythmic prose.

Of course each writer has to evaluate his or her own level of compentency. Perhaps you don't need an extensive review of the period (I skimmed that section in about a minute) or what constitutes a sentence and what does not. But what about the comma, or the semi-colon, or the colon? Do you know how to use these effectively? You can put a parenthetical statement in a sentence with a comma, a parentheses, or a dash. Have you thought about what effect each one creates?

Most importantly is sentence structure. Do you know how to write a parallel sentence? Do you know what a periodic sentence is and how to use it when you want to emphasize a particular idea? Do you know how to cooridinate and subordinate your ideas within a sentence? Do you know how to maintain clairty in a long sentence of, say, 250 words?

The more ways you know how to write something, the better your writing will be. I think a lot of novice writers devalue the principles of composition because they don't think these principles are necessary to telling a good story. And in a sense, that's true.

But here is the problem: if you don't know these principles, how can you really tell a fictional dream? I'm not talking about making up a story. I'm talking about TELLING the story in such a way that the reader is slowly lulled into a fictional dream from which it's very hard to wake. Sure, a bad or banal plot will keep the reader out of the dream. But so will clumsy and bad writing. The principles of composition (along with an effective vocabulary) are the necessary tools to create a solid fictional dream.

Obviously I'm a big advocate of this. I know it's a bitter pill to swallow, because it means actually studying these principles. But in the long run, what is it going to hurt? So you take a month and assiduously work your way through a composition book, getting help when you need it. What could possibly be the down side to doing this, except that it's a bit borning and, at times, a tad frustrating? In just one month you can assure yourself that you won't be getting rejection slips because you can't write proper English.

Now that I'm sounding too much like an info-commerical, I shall stop. I think my point has been made.

I don't hear any bombs dropping.

I have done a pretty thorough review of grammar in the past, but I have been thinking a lot about doing another review. The reason is partly what Jerome suggested. I don't always know when to use a colon, or a semicolon, for example. And while I *think* I know how to construct a sentence, I don't think it could hurt anyone to brush up from time to time.

All I saw, of course, was that she didn't like my poems and wanted me to write someone else's poems instead. The nerve! I was in Full Artistic Pique for about a month, but never followed through on my plan to send said editor a nasty "screw you!" sonnet.

Knowing what I know now about the slushpile, I'm wondering if I shouldn't send her a note thanking her for taking the the time to offer what actually turned out to be a perfectly valid piece of advice.