Despite best attempts to introduce levity, the Annual
Review remains a serious journal of essays, etc, by members. Any
member can submit. It is up to the editor to decide what we have enough room
to publish. We are under pressure from the environment and world events etc
to reduce volume weight, and that will probably mean reducing content as
well. So this year, 2024, we are limiting submissions to two per person, and
we will choose only one of those to print.
Please follow the guidelines below, and remember to put your surname in
the file label, and your full name on the first page of the essay.
DEADLINE: For 2024, essays must arrive by 1 October. Early
submissions are gratefully accepted, as we will have more time to give them
our full attention.
DELIVERY: email to editor@oxfordphilsoc.org
THE BASIC RULES:
Max length 4000 words, INCLUDING bibliography.
House style: Please limit the bibliography to only those references you cite
in the document, and do not include everything you've read on the topic,
interesting though that may be. Do cite anything you quote either directly
or indirectly. The Department would frown upon any lawsuits. Inline
citations are best – in brackets at the end of the sentence that
contains the reference. Example:
If our spirits are uplifted and our confidence boosted by a beautiful garden
or a bright, clean, comfortable interior space, the opposite effect, de
Botton suspects, is the result of time spent in confined, crumbling,
stinking environments of 'stained carpets and plastic curtains' (de Botton
2006:12-14).
Then put the full reference in the bibliography – name and initials,
year[.] title, publisher:
de Botton A, 2006. The Architecture of Happiness, Penguin.
PLEASE put footnotes and references at the end of the article, not the
bottom of each page. It's OK to use superscript numbers, but this leads to
longer bibliographies, as full references tend to need repeating for every
citation.
Please spell-check your file.
File format: Microsoft Word doc. or doc.x. Times New Roman font (please).
File label: Your Surname followed by part of title. Example: the essay
entitled 'The Heritability of Acquired Tastes' by Barbara Prentiss would be
labeled Prentiss.Heritability.docx
Please type your name on the first page of the text.
There is a limit on the number of pages we are allowed to print—please
submit no more than two essays and two literature reviews, and accept that
one of each will probably be selected for space reasons.
CONTENT:
Essays can be on anything as long as philosophy is the reason for
writing. There are many styles of doing this, from a casual
correspondence style to a formal academic essay style.
Literature reviews can be on new books, old books, film, theatre, music,
TV, or podcasts, as long as your topic or analysis is philosophical and
follows a good review structure (Title, Author, year of publication and
publisher beneath the title of your essay and above your name). Write
the sort of thing we read in reputable rags – something that tells
us about the item and leads us to your philosophical conclusions.
Poems and short playscripts/dialogues, cartoons and puzzles are also
accepted.
Members' Publications: Some of us are published authors, and the rest of
us would like to hear about it. If you have written a recently published
book or written a recently produced play, film, podcast or opera etc,
send me a paragraph (please keep it under 500 words) about your latest
opus, and an image of the cover (or a link we can grab it from).
For Prize Essays, we are able to publish only the first place student essays
(Talbot Prizes). For the Chadwick competition, we will publish the Chadwick
winner, the Boethius winner, and the Lyceum winner.
Members Weekend and Away Days: If you are a speaker, you may transform your
presentation into an essay following The Basic Rules listed above, and
submit that on or before the 1 Oct deadline.
PROCEDURE:
In accordance with longstanding editorial tradition, we will butcher your
piece. But you will be sent a proof of the setting in enough time to make
small changes. Even if we do nothing but take out a comma, errors do creep
in when Microsoft Word files are imported into Adobe InDesign.
