In revising my essay on Zola for resubmission, I finally realized that my mistake is to assume that my readers are not simply more knowledgeable than me in every possible way, but also aware of all the connections and intersections I do not indicate explicitly. My writing model is perhaps extremely solipsistic: I'm always writing only to the future me who would retrospectively comprehend the full significance of past drafts which were in their original form deplorably incomplete and fragmentary. Anyway, I'm glad to read that two reviewers, professional Zola scholars, appreciate my rather autodidactic approach and "strongly recommend" my essay for publication, despite that both of them criticize that my sentences are too clumsy--yes, I admit that they are indeed so--and one of them even suggests that the whole draft should be rewritten by a native speaker!
