Writer's Guide
If you are interested in writing for Kasurian, you should submit a one-pager pitch to kasurianmag@gmail.com, consisting of no more than 500 words, setting out the theme, narrative, and structure of your proposed essay.
This pitch should display a working knowledge of Kasurian’s mission and style, a short biography of no more than two sentences, explaining who you are, what you do, and what you are generally interested in, and a brief literature overview for the topic you are writing on. Ideally, this will include published books, papers, or even newspaper and blog articles of sufficient quality.
We publish final pieces between 2,000-3,000 words in length. Please do not submit a completed piece immediately. Please do not submit pieces of fiction, poetry, or academic articles.
If your pitch aligns with our mission, our editorial team will get back to you within two weeks to discuss the idea, details, and logistics of your essay. We usually prefer two to three rounds of drafting and feedback before final publication. Our editorial team will engage in a rigorous, hands-on, and collaborative editing process with you to ensure that essays meet the editorial standards of Kasurian.
These standards also mean that we pass on most pitches that are submitted to us, and we will always provide feedback for improvement.
General Do’s
Essays are timeless and legible:
Timeless: if someone reads your essay in five or ten years’ time, is it still relevant?
Legible: if someone reads your essay, do they feel like the world has become more legible?
Is/Ought: Essays should be descriptive and analytical. We want to provide our readers with the ideas they can use as tools to ‘make sense’ of the world; good pitches contain ideas and frameworks that provide explanatory power. Don’t get Ought confused with Is!
Write with curiosity and conviction: we want writing that conveys a confident understanding of the issue, but also curiosity in learning more beyond it.
General Don'ts
Avoid generalisations. E.g. ‘Muslims’, ‘Liberalism’, etc. Provide categorisations of specific cultural, geographic, or political modes, allegiances, entities, etc that have real analytical power.
Avoid academic jargon: we do not accept academic pieces, or pieces heavy with academic jargon. If your essay contains words like ‘ontological’ or ‘semiotic’, we will not publish it.
We don’t want topics, we want stories: who, what, where, and why matter just as much as ‘how’. Theory should be grounded in case studies.
Don’t be polemical: we are not interested in asinine tribalism, so avoid antagonistic language and caricatures.
Don’t bury the lede: your argument should be front, centre, and clear. Don’t beat about the bush.
Clear and accessible English is very important to us and our readership. A good guide on the difference between bad academic English and good old English is George Orwell’s essay, Politics & the English Language.
Observe the difference:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Orwell’s 6 rules are also useful to follow:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
For further guidance, please refer to essays previously published on Kasurian: