I am increasingly in a position where I am writing papers with students I am mentoring. Since these projects are primarily meant to expose them to research, I will often have them take the lead on the writing/figure generation/etc.
What I am wondering is to what standard should I hold the presentation quality of their papers?
On the one hand, these are students who are still developing as academic writers, so some (to a lot) of guidance and "hand-holding" is needed to get the papers into a form which is acceptable for submission. On the other hand, "acceptable" is probably not the standard which most academics have for the writing in their own papers. However, it seems a bit unreasonable to hold others to same standards I have for my own work; we've all heard stories of advisors who nitpick about things which nobody else seems to care about, and there are certainly things which I personally care about in my own papers (and am happy to spend lots of time on) which I doubt many other researchers even notice. How do I determine a good balance?
