The Mistakes (Almost) Everyone Makes When Writing for Eidolon

E(i)ditorial — January 2016

When I was at the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting earlier this month, someone asked me what I’d found to be the most challenging part of editing Eidolon. The real answer, of course, is finding the time to work on it as much as I’d like. But there are a number of smaller challenges that often occur when editing individual articles, and my interlocutor was much more interested in hearing about those than my own time management struggles.

If you’re writing an article for Eidolon — or doing any kind of public scholarship— look at whether you’re falling into one of these common traps:

You haven’t figured out why it matters that something from the ancient world resembles something from the modern world

This is, bar none, the problem we see most frequently. Comparisons between the ancient and modern world are one of the most popular article types on Eidolon, and an interesting or unexpected resonance between the two is often the start of a great article. But too often we receive drafts where the writer is content to list similarities between ancient and modern without interrogating what’s at stake in the comparison itself.

What does it mean for the modern part of the comparison that it resembles the ancient world? How does our view of the ancient world change based on the similarity with the present day? Any good comparison will answer these questions — and will also be sympathetic to the the tensions and differences that complicate the comparison. Oversimplification is rarely a good choice. On the other hand, too much nuance can lead to other problems, such as…

You’re narrowing your scope because you’re worried that someone may have made your point already

It’s hard to blame younger scholars for this tendency, because it’s what we’re specifically trained to do: find a narrow topic that hasn’t been addressed before. But unlike in traditional scholarship, you won’t be judged on whether your Eidolon article makes a substantial new contribution to your field. It’s much more important to be clear, entertaining, and to express a unique point of view about a topic people already find interesting.

If someone has already written something similar, all the better: readers like to see that you’re participating in an ongoing conversation. I’ve addressed this concern before in my editorial about why public intellectuals shouldn’t worry about getting scooped, but it bears repeating: it’s almost impossible to get scooped when you’re writing informal scholarship for an online venue.

Your article is too long and it’s taking you too much time to write

In Eidolon’s original manifesto, we asked for articles to be 1500–2500 words. The average length is now closer to 2500 than 2000. I’m comfortable with that shift, but not every article needs to be 3000 words or longer. A tightly organized piece that makes its point in a concise and interesting way will almost always be more successful than a 5000 word draft you spent weeks adding to here and there.

If you’re already very familiar with your subject matter, because it connects to your other research, writing about it in an informal and accessible way shouldn’t take more than a week — unless you’re overburdened with other commitments, as academics always are, so perhaps two weeks. One of the main differences between Eidolon and peer-reviewed scholarship is how much quicker our time from submission to publication is. Take advantage of that!

We try our best to head these problems off during the first phase of editing, while discussing the writer’s pitch with them, but we don’t always succeed. Fortunately, they’re all eminently fixable. I sometimes feel that our editorial and revision process is often more extensive than our writers expect. But as an editor, one of my most exciting challenges is encouraging people to try to get more meaning from their ancient comparisons in less space.

Because of the SCS, Eidolon published fewer articles than usual in January. Along with the announcement of our essay contest for high school students, Eidolon published five articles this month:

Justin Slocum Bailey explained how to apply the principles of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) to Latin pedagogy in Teaching Latin to Humans
Prudentia, in the second installment of our advice column, Prudentiae Sal., responded to an amateur classics enthusiast looking to connect more with the field (and vice versa) in The Latin Lover
E.D. Adams and T.J. Bolt argued that horror movies like the Scream series are the true inheritors of Greek tragedy in Horrific Catharsis
Ioannis Ziogas took us deep into the world Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, showing the merits of a bi-directional reception in Ovid’s Satanic Verses
Matther Wellenbach explored the ancient roots of modern rap dramas like Hamilton and Chi-raq in Hip-Hopera Americana

As always, thank you for reading!

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Her first book, currently titled Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.