Editorial Letter is a newsletter by Philip Sayers, aimed at people who write (or edit) nonfiction, especially nonfiction that makes arguments.
I’m a developmental editor, and I work with academic authors, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, in fields like anthropology, literature, religion, critical theory, and cultural studies. I work with my clients on writing in various genres: monographs and journal articles, but also public writing, book proposals, cultural criticism, policy reports, and more. All of it, though, tends to be argument-driven. This is a newsletter for anyone who writes arguments. In it, I provide examples of effective arguments, and show why they’re effective and what you can learn from them.
The examples are taken from a range of sources, which reflect what I’m reading at any given time. Some are from scholarly writing, in the fields that I tend to read from most often: literary studies, anthropology, critical theory. Lots are from the wide umbrella of internet writing: so cultural criticism, journalism, reviews, Twitter threads, personal essays, newsletters. In addition to providing writing guidance, then, Editorial Letter aims to be a source of some interesting reading recommendations.
Each post is short, focusing on one example. Examples are often single sentences, and my goal is to identify what it is that the writer is doing, explain why I think it’s effective, and make it visible and concrete so that you can, if you like, try something similar in your own writing. What I’m doing is mostly close reading—an approach that’s informed by my own academic background (I have a PhD in English, and a scholarly book based on my dissertation called Authorship’s Wake). I focus on the same things I focus on when I’m doing developmental editing work: argument, evidence, structure, and style.
An editorial letter is a common part of the process of developmental editing: in my work, it’s the first step in an ongoing conversation with an author that’s oriented toward producing a revised draft that makes a clear argument supported by strong evidence and an effective structure.
Editorial Letter shares that aim.
