Preparing an article for publication

I have been writing on several related topics over the past year and have finally put together a paper that looks like it is worth publishing. In the process of putting my "finishing" touches on the paper I wondered how a "first timer" like me can reduce the possibility of rejection, how do I know the writing is "good enough", who do I go to for this kind of advice or guidance?

I took the bull by the horns and sent a couple of articles off to a faculty member for review which have come back with very helpful feedback. One comment has left me wondering how to maintain a connection with the reader while removing references to "our" patients or how "we" practice... The recommendation is that the "we" and "our" always becomes "nurses" and that nurses are referred to as his/her or he/she rather than just she. I can understand the gender issue as there are men in nursing but writing he/she seems cumbersome! Regarding the issue of "our" patients, here is an example of one sentence where I think changing "our" to "the" distances nurse from the family they are (I am) working with: "I question if it is possible to provide ethical nursing care without having a relationship with our (the) patient's family, a relationship built on trust and compassion."

Any thoughts on this?

Dissertationese

I am reading The Formation of Scholars--a book published about doctoral education in the 21st century. The authors quote from Olson and Drew (1998) about dissertation writing: "As an academic exercise, the dissertation became primarily the instrument by which students demonstrated to their professors that they had a thorough grasp of research in the field. It had become overburdened with exhaustive reviews of the scholarly literature. . . bogged down in a superfluity of discursive footnotes, and even the language changed to the defensive, obfuscatory, stilted prose now referred to as dissertationese" (p. 59).

William Germano also describes painful-to-read dissertation prose in his wonderful book From Dissertation to Book.

What is the solution?  How can we help students to use the dissertation as a vehicle for finding their authorial voice?