  We aim to resolve a misunderstanding about whether the so-called "Earth term"
in the pulsar timing response to a gravitational wave is in phase among a set
of pulsars. We note that the misunderstanding has potentially arisen from the
statements that the Earth term is "coherent" or "builds up coherently" among
the pulsars. We clarify what authors mean by "coherent" in these statements,
pointing out that "coherent" does not indicate that the Earth terms are in
phase among the pulsars. Using the pulsar timing residuals induced by a
continuous gravitational wave, we show that the Earth term does not align
across different pulsars except for the special case when the
gravitational-wave source is edge-on, i.e. when the orbital inclination angle
of the source is either $\iota=\pi/2$ or $3\pi/2$. We demonstrate the same
concept using the pulsar timing software libstempo by plotting the Earth terms
from a set of pulsars.
