| Abstract |
Each year, Eighteenth-Century Life publishes about twelve essays across three issues, and for every essay we accept, we reject about eight. That means I’ve been reading about a hundred unpublishable essays every year, about two a week, and I’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years. Thus, at the risk of sounding immodest, I think it fair to say that I’m an expert on the genre of the unpublishable article. Of course, there are dozens of ways of rendering an article unpublishable, and, indeed, every few months I discover new techniques I had never before encountered, a testament, no doubt, to the power of human ingenuity. I readily admit there is no way to give an exhaustive account of how an essay can fail, but I think I can identify a few techniques that are generally reliable, and relatively easy to learn.
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