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. 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, 2022, I am limiting submissions to two per person, and I 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 2022, essays must arrive by 1 October. Early
submissions are gratefully accepted, as I will 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.
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: 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.)
I will have to limit the number of pages we are allowed to print—please
submit no more than two essays and two literature reviews, and accept that I
will probably select one of each 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 I can grab it from).
For Prize Essays, I am able to publish only the first place student essays
(Talbot Prizes). For the Chadwick competition, I will publish the Chadwick
winner, the Boethius winner, and the Lyceum winner.
Members Weekend and Away Days: I will not publish transcripts of these
presentations, as they will be on the website anyway. If you are a speaker,
you may rewrite your transcript as an essay if you wish, and submit that on
or before the 1 Oct deadline.
PROCEDURE:
In accordance with longstanding editorial 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.
