Tell the Story:

To write a successful article for a major anthropology journal, authors can employ a number of strategies. The first and most essential is to familiarize themselves with the journal’s mission. For AE, authors must ground their arguments in current debates in the discipline, make a clear contribution to anthropological theory, support this contribution with ethnography, and demonstrate its relevance to contemporary sociocultural problems. Moreover, AE authors must cite other authors appropriately, cohesively structure the article, and avoid various problems that afflict much of academic writing—such as evasive metadiscourse, inflated diction, serial citation, and unnecessary literature reviews. To maximize the article’s online discoverability, authors should judiciously compose their titles and abstracts and carefully choose their accompanying keywords. [writing, composition, publishing, editing, theory, ethnography, American Ethnologist] S ince 2015 we have been working as, respectively, editorin-chief and senior copyeditor of American Ethnologist. During this time the first author has read, evaluated, and commented on hundreds of manuscripts and read, interpreted, and distilled thousands of reviewers’ reports. The second author has worked with dozens of authors to copyedit and polish their accepted manuscripts. It now strikes us as a propitious moment to draw on this experience and offer some advice to prospective authors, especially those in the early stages of their scholarly careers. What makes a successful submission to AE and, more broadly, to a general-interest anthropology journal? This question is seldom addressed in our discipline, even though it is shrouded in mystery in the minds of many scholars. This may explain the exceptional popularity of a two-hour workshop on journal publishing that Niko Besnier, since becoming editor of AE, has given at several anthropology departments and conferences around the world (in four languages so far). Much of the material we present here is based on this workshop. By making this material widely available, we hope that prospective authors will improve the quality of their submissions to AE and comparable journals, making their work more likely to be accepted for publication. We are not the first to write about submitting to anthropology journals. For example, former American Anthropologist editor Tom Boellstorff (2008, 2010, 2011; Vora and Boellstorff 2012), as well as others (e.g., Holbraad, n.d.; Unger 2017), offers sound advice on the topic, and we encourage readers to consult these useful sources.1 Among other things, they advise authors to ensure that their data support their theoretical claims, to avoid sweeping generalizations, to be attentive to presentation (avoiding typos, eliminating tracked changes, etc.), and to be polite when corresponding with editors, AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 163–172, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2018 The Authors. American Ethnologist published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12629 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. American Ethnologist Volume 45 Number 2 May 2018 copyeditors, and editorial assistants. We agree wholeheartedly with all these suggestions (particularly the last one). Here, however, we aim to do something different: to offer advice on what makes a successful manuscript, from broad questions of how to connect theory with ethnographic data to more specific problems of composition. Along the way we will also point out issues that usually signal that the manuscript needs more work. We do not aim to provide a universal set of guidelines on how to structure arguments and construct an effective text—an impossible task, since there are so many ways of doing so. Nor do we present an exhaustive treatise on every aspect of writing good scholarly prose. Rather, the following discussion focuses on key problems in the manuscripts we review, problems that appear so often that we feel compelled to address them. American Ethnologist’s mission Before submitting an article, an author must ensure that it is appropriate for the journal in question. For early-career scholars in particular, choosing which journal to submit to can be a formidable task for which few guidelines are available. Determining the submission’s “fit” is an important task, although authors must bear in mind that fit is not the only factor in editorial decisions. One way to determine whether a journal is a good choice is to carefully read recent issues; a surprising number of authors seem to skip this basic first step. The author should focus on the kinds of themes the journal emphasizes, the balance between abstractions and empirical materials, and the journal’s theoretical ambitions. The author should also pay attention to the textual organization of articles, such as section structures (e.g., are they numbered?), endnotes (how many in a typical article?), and style (how formal?), since the more closely a submission resembles published articles, the more likely the editor and reviewers are to see it as viable. The other essential step is to carefully read the journal’s website (many potential authors also seem to skip this step, even though at submission to AE they are asked to confirm that they have “followed the journal’s instructions on the form and style of the title, abstract, keywords, main text, notes, and references”). One central item on the website is the journal’s mission statement. “American Ethnologist,” it declares, “is a quarterly journal concerned with social and cultural anthropology in the broadest sense of the term.” It continues, “The journal’s articles combine ethnographic specificity with original theoretical thinking, conveying the relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world.” The key terms in these statements are “theory,” “ethnography,” and “relevance to the contemporary,” which capture the three main aspects of the journal’s mission. Three keywords Not all anthropology journals have the same aims and standards. Some specialize in a specific area of knowledge or a particular region of the world. But even journals that address generalist readers differ from one another. While most editors are prepared to consider manuscripts that fall outside the journal’s traditional scope, they also have a responsibility to maintain a certain orientation that their predecessors have established and that has contributed over the years to the journal’s “branding.”