Despite my 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 me to decide what we have enough room to publish.
DEADLINE: For 2021, essays must arrive by 1 October. Early
submissions are gratefully accepted, as I may have more time to give them
my 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.
All Footnotes and References must come 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: MSW doc.x. Times New Roman font (please).
File label: Your Surname followed by part of title. Example: my essay
entitled ‘The Heritability of Acquired Tastes’ would be labeled
Prentiss.Heritability.docx
Please type your name on the first page of the text. (I can invent a title
if you have not done one, but I can't invent your name – and it's a pain
trying to find your email.)
You may submit up to three essays and three literature reviews.
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. Look at past Reviews on this website
(available in pdf form).
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.
Member's 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 I can grab it from).
Prize Essays: We publish the best of the year's student essays, and the
Chadwick, Boethius, and Lyceum winners. If you have submitted an essay for one
of these prizes, do not submit it to me first.
Images: Tricky. Technically, we need permission to reprint photos. Not my
job to chase Rights. Your own photos, illustrations, and diagrams are ok. Keep
in mind the setting is a two-column format – I may have to redesign a table to
fit if it is a landscape diagram.
PROCEDURE:
I am a professional editor, so, in accordance with longstanding
tradition, I will butcher your piece. But you will be sent a proof of the
setting in enough time to make small changes. Even if I did nothing but take
out a comma, errors do creep in when MSW files are imported into InDesign.
