How to diagnose problems in a paper rejected in pre-review? Two weeks after sending my manuscript to a journal, it was rejected in the pre-review stage and hence, there were no comments from reviewers about problems with the paper.


Can poor scientific writing be the reason for this fast rejection?
What do editors do in the pre-review stage?
How can I diagnose problems with a rejected paper?



  Thank you for submitting your article to AIDS.
  
  Unfortunately, your paper did not receive a high enough priority
  rating, and the Editors have decided that it should not be accepted
  for publication in AIDS.
  
  Decisions regarding acceptance of papers in AIDS are made in reference
  to the Editors pre-review and also in relation to the standard of
  other papers submitted. Our rejection rate is more than 70% and to
  save time the Editors of the Journal collectively evaluate submissions
  and consider whether a panel of other reviewers should review the
  article by determining if it would be of high enough interest to be
  selected for publication. On this occasion the Editors assessed your
  article without asking for formal reviews. There are therefore no
  reviewers' comments. 
  
  Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. We
  regret that we cannot publish your paper at this time, but we hope
  that you will consider submitting future papers to AIDS.
The pre-review stage is generally a very quick assessment of the manuscript in which editors go through it to check primarily whether the article matches the scope of the journal, the level of novelty of the study, and how interesting it would be to the target audience. For a journal that has a 70 percent rejection rate, I don't think they would give enough time to a paper at the pre-review stage to reject it on the basis of the writing style, unless the style is really very bad. They would probably just read the cover letter, abstract, and results and discussion section carefully and skim through the rest of the paper.

I don't think there is any way to learn more about the reasons for rejection from the journal. However, don't get upset or think that the quality of your paper is not good. Since this journal has such a high rejection rate, it is natural that only the very best or the most path breaking studies will find their way to this journal. This journal might not consider your study novel enough or interesting enough, but there are many other journals that will find it interesting. At this stage, there isn't much that you can do to improve your paper, as you haven't received any reviewer comments. You will have to just submit it to the next journal and hope that the paper goes through peer review.