Earlier this year, we asked for your questions for editors of public philosophy venues. Last week, we shared their answers to your questions on pitching. Today, in part two of the three part series, they talk about how you can get their attention … and keep it.
The editors who participated are (in alphabetical order):
Anastasia Berg, The Point
Peter Catapano, The Stone, The New York Times
Sam Haselby, Aeon
Matt Lord, Boston Review
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA
Look for part three on Monday.
* * *
Do you find potential writers from blogs and social media?
Anastasia Berg, The Point:
Sometimes, yes. We’re always on the prowl for fresh voices!
Peter Catapano, The New York Times:
Social media, not really. Though if by “blogs” you mean independent online publications, sure. If I see an interesting or well-done piece of writing anywhere, I’ll be interested in that person’s work. And of course, I have a handful of medium-to-large publications that I read when I can, and sometimes find writers there.
Sam Haselby, Aeon:
Yes.
Matt Lord, Boston Review:
Absolutely. You’ll easily catch an editor’s eye if you crystallize a powerful insight on Twitter or write a sharp blog or Facebook post. Many pieces begin that way: We are impressed by work we find in this or that corner of the internet, and we try to get in touch and make the case for bringing it to a wide audience.
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA:
We do solicit from folks we encounter on social media, and we have been known to ask people to write something based on what they write on social media, and occasionally blogs, though we have run into difficulties asking people to develop something from another blog to be for the Women in Philosophy series. We don’t repost from blogs, and we want posts to be re-shaped for our series if they appeared in another blog.
What are some common mistakes that philosophers make in writing for a public audience? — David Thorstad
Anastasia Berg, The Point:
One of my favorite topics!
The first thing to say is that, at The Point, we’re always very happy to look at pitches/pieces by professional philosophers who’d like to try to write for the general public, and we have had a lot of success with such writers in the past, so this is not meant to discourage submissions or writerly ambitious more generally, just to honestly represent what are the basic criteria we use to evaluate submissions of this sort and what are the common pitfalls.
With that in mind:
Insofar as philosophy or the kind of thinking philosophers are capable of can help people think about how to live, the impulse to try and reach a wider influence seems like a good one. Of all the humanists, it seems natural to suppose that philosophers would have plenty to offer to the general educated audience. But, as the readers of this entry know well, “philosophy” itself, even in its earlier less-professionalized iterations, is not something people simply can pick up, but is an activity that requires learning and training. This presents the question about what would it mean to do philosophy “publicly”, i.e., to “do it” with people who are not similarly trained and, very importantly, are not one’s students.
This challenge accounts for two main pitfalls, two kinds of essays philosophers sometimes end up coming up with when they try to write for the public:
- The undergraduate lecture disguised as an essay. In this genre philosophers confuse the “general public” with first year undergraduates enrolled in their classes. In other words, the philosopher assumes the audience’s interest, and thinks all that is required of them is adjusting their writing for the relative inexperience of the reader. But simplifying one’s ideas, explaining them in detail, and giving examples is not enough. An essay must, first, address an audience’s existing concerns/interests or persuade one’s readers to adopt new ones, and, second, a good prose essay is not a good lecture, but has things like voice, narrative, style, etc.
- The op-ed. The philosopher shares her opinions, which in truth have little to do with her philosophical training, using her authority as a “professional philosopher” to validate them. “As an epistemologist I can tell you fake news is bad,” this sort of thing. The philosopher expects people ought to listen to her and believe her because she’s a professional philosopher. What’s more, often the philosophers’ opinions tend to be shared by the intended audience, so the act of writing is one of reflecting and bolstering existing common sense or, worse, prejudices.
But if I may, I’d like to say something about what makes good essays written by philosophers, as well. I think philosophers who succeed in writing do so either by being good essayists (surely drawing on their philosophical training but not by explicitly mentioning or necessarily displaying it, e.g., https://thepointmag.com/criticism/rape-fantasies/) or, which is rarer and perhaps harder, by trying to think through what it would mean to “do philosophy” publicly (e.g., https://thepointmag.com/author/acallard/).
Incidentally, but worth mentioning in this context, I think that the audience reading Agnes Callard’s columns also derives readerly satisfaction from her willingness to be vulnerable, either by taking intellectual risks (daring to think something through for the first time) as well as by showing that she, too, has a real stake in the question she raises, and not simply in the sense of, she too is concerned with injustice, or she works on a topic and it so happens to be she can “apply her research” to a news item. At best, her columns display a non-sentimental, non-confessional forthcoming-ness and an analytic, detached, methodical analysis of various phenomenon, that may or may not have to do with what she’s a philosopher “of,” that together model for the reader how she, too, might go about approaching and thinking about the things she cares about most. In other words, the personal angle in such essays is not just a way of luring a reader in, giving examples, or even gaining their trust, but can mark the difference between an essay that registers the attempt of an individual to grapple with a question and the philosophy lecture disguised as an essay or the pamphlet disguised as philosophy.
With all this in mind, we’re genuinely very open to working with philosophers to help them write essays that we think our readers would really love and learn from.
Peter Catapano, The New York Times:
The most common problem is using technical language or jargon, and framing arguments in a style that might appeal to academic colleagues but be off-putting to a more general audience. But by now most philosophers know that the language of journalism or even general essay writing is a different kind of discipline and they seem on the whole do a good job of making sure the work they submit to us is accessible. I have a colleague who used to tell his writers, half-jokingly, to “write it so a really intelligent 11th grader can understand it” and I thought that was a great target to aim for, right between making it too dense and too simplified.
But to be honest, I don’t run into too many “mistakes” these days. The fact that public philosophy has taken on an importance in academia as well as the media seems to have gotten most of us on the same page.
Sam Haselby, Aeon:
Avoid the first-person plural. A writer relying on “we” and “our” a lot in his or her pitch or work is often addressing the liberal intelligentsia and their shared presumptions.
Matt Lord, Boston Review:
Probably the most distinctively philosophical mistakes are excessive abstraction and useless accuracy. Both can arise from reading too little public writing. It is like what Donald Davidson says about conceptual schemes: “It is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement.” Abstraction can sound exciting—it promises to explain so much—but at the cost of meaning anything definite. Accuracy can clarify, but at the price of explaining too little—substituting formal problems for real ones, or regimenting the world away. The best pieces of public philosophy always seem to me to strike a balance I did not think was possible.
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA:
Philosophers hedge their claims too much: they use so many parenthetical clauses or “however,” “although” statements, acknowledging another view. Of course, publicly oriented posts have a place for considering other views, but it can be excessive. Philosophers can be more interested in showing they know things than making something readable to a wider public and that concern makes a post cumbersome to read. I advise authors to leave out all the hedging and just make claims and stand by them.
I’ve heard from editors it’s important to cultivate a good professional relationship with an editor. How do you do that? — Helen De Cruz
Anastasia Berg, The Point:
In addition to all the things that go into cultivating a good professional relationship in general—say, respecting other people’s time—there are a few editorial pet peeves I would recommend avoiding. Generally put, try to take as seriously as you can the edits you’re offered. This doesn’t mean you have to accept them all, but it does mean you would do well to explain why you’re resisting a suggestion, instead of just ignoring it and, better yet, offer an alternative. For example, if the editor cuts something because they think it’s confusing but you think it’s important, try and put it in a new way that makes clear the importance of the point. Also, while it’s natural to want to get lots of editorial feedback, be careful of the “too many cooks in the kitchen” pitfall, and to the extent possible, try and focus on the feedback offered to you by the editor of the magazine you’re writing for. In particular, I’d avoid quoting your friends, roommates, family members, etc. as an argument for rejecting your editor’s suggestion.
On the other hand, and don’t tell other editors I said this, but an editor will usually forgive a very good writer quite a bit …
Peter Catapano, The New York Times:
The rules are the same for any good relationship. Be respectful. Be kind. See where it goes from there. It starts out through cordial introductions and correspondences. If your work is not accepted, be gracious. You are welcome to try again in the future. If you have work accepted, that work process must be cooperative and productive. A writer who is too set in his or her ways or too stubborn to allow for the collaboration of editing can really jam up the works and cause frustration on both ends. Ideally, with each collaboration your relationship with your editor will deepen and improve, but again, it takes time.
Sam Haselby, Aeon:
You do what the editor says—most of the time.
Matt Lord, Boston Review:
I’d say the way you cultivate any good professional relationship: with open communication and mutual respect. It doesn’t help that editing is shrouded in mystique; few people know what to expect. It’s usually a lot more invasive than peer review, where you get a few comments or a reader’s report. Your writing may be scrutinized, adjusted, finessed, possibly straight up rewritten, in a way you have never experienced. But it’s a rewarding form of intellectual work in part because it’s so challenging. The world is listening: How do we get it right?
The process is supposed to be collaborative, not adversarial: Set your ego aside. (Not that you have to accept all the edits you get, but you should be willing to receive feedback.) I think most people would be shocked to discover how much time and labor go into just one piece of writing: It involves a small army of people, from various early readers to the principal editor to the copyeditor, fact checker, and those involved in web or print production and social media promotion. Good working relationships are built on the recognition that it takes a village to bring your important ideas to a broad audience.
Beyond all that, it’s just nice to stay in touch—feel free to drop a message to update us about your work, tell us about an idea you think we should cover, or point us to other writers you think we should publish.
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA:
At the Women in Philosophy series, we tend not to have repeat posters, though we are not opposed. We publish every other week and we want to have many different perspectives and give many different folks an opportunity to publish—we see ourselves as serving the field by giving opportunities to women to publish public philosophy as much as bringing work to the wider world, so we want to make that opportunity widely available.
Helen De Cruz
Helen De Cruz holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of religion. Recent publications include De Cruz, De Smedt & Schwitzgebel (Eds.) Philosophy through science fiction stories (Bloomsbury, 2021) and De Cruz (Ed. and illustrator). Philosophy illustrated. 42 thought experiments to broaden your mind (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
David V. Johnson
David V. Johnson is the public philosophy editor of the APA Blog and deputy editor of Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is a former philosophy professor turned journalist with more than a decade of experience as an editor and writer. Previously, he was senior opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, where he edited the op-ed section of the news channel’s website. Earlier in his career, he served as online editor at Boston Review and research editor at San Francisco magazine the year it won a National Magazine Award for general excellence. He has written for The New York Times, USA Today, The New Republic, Bookforum, Aeon, Dissent, and The Baffler, among other publications.
