Conventions Matter

Conventions aren’t just rules or expectations that limit you. They can also be tools to help you.

We could parse it this way: expectations and conventions. Expectations are what people are looking for; conventions are how they are looking for you to do it. There is no reason why you couldn’t use those expectations either to help reinforce conventional argumentation or structure or subvert it.

Mostly, in this post, I’m speaking of structural conventions, the conventions of genre and argumentation, the modules that come together to create the whole, whether it be book arc or article shape or edited volume collection.

Readers often need some form of familiarity, for accessibility and ease of reading, also for epistemological clues. Conventions have been around long enough and appear often enough to have become subconscious guides, often almost invisible to readers.

When you understand the conventions in an area, you can break them down into their component parts and see what works for you, what doesn’t, and how you might want to navigate that. It only depends on what you need to get done and for whom.

As an editor, I’m trained to see, understand, communicate, and manipulate the possibilities of conventional expectations and forms. Give that, the question I’m always asking is, how can we make those conventions work for you and within what you want to say?

If you need them to

You know what is important to you and what you might consider an acceptable compromise, if any, to achieve your goal.

As you know all too well, if your goal is to publish scholarly work, that will come with it a set of spoken and unspoken expectations and forms, as well as professional power dynamics that can affect who is given the flexibility to play with such conventions.

Do you need a tenure-legible monograph published by an academic press? Are you writing your second book, with more latitude in subject, form, and audience? Are you putting together an edited volume from a conference or perhaps a scholarly companion volume?

Do you need an article published in a field-defining journal for visibility, job market competitiveness, or promotion dossier? Or are you perhaps interested in writing a more interdisciplinary article, a piece of public intellectual writing, or even experimental think piece?

What audience are you looking for, what work do you need this piece to do for you, what are your ethical, artistic, and professional goals or hopes for your writing, and what are the conventions at play for each of these elements? How “professional” do you need to seem at this moment, and what might that even look like for you?

Particularly for junior, marginalized, or otherwise-vulnerable scholars, this might seem to mean being more formally conservative or perhaps narrowing the scope of your claims in response to reader comments or field hostility.

Not that what you are saying isn’t worth being said even more loudly, in even greater detail, at greater depth, and in the way that you think could best explain it, but perhaps you are finding that people are acting in ways that require you to have built up greater authority, or whatever they’re calling it, for them to hear you.

One way of doing that could be to adopt and demonstrate particular scholarly conventions to create that trapping for them, even though (and I cannot say this loudly enough) you shouldn’t have to.

If you want them to

So, yes, conventions can limit you. And they can require compromises that you might not want to make and that you should not need to make. Only you know what is best for you — within the constraints of the field, professional requirements, and genre expectations of your readers, acquiring editors, and the publishing industry as a whole.

But conventions can also help you. They can help you guide readers through your thought, and they can also help you clarify your own thinking in the writing process.

As we’ve touched on already, the immediate legibility of a conventional structure can be used to help make more radical, complex, contested, or unusual thinking accessible. Giving people a structure they recognize will take the pressure off their reading experience and they will have more space to engage with the complexities of your content.

You can use the convention’s techne to subconsciously flag twists, turns, and steps in argument, to subtly signpost argumentation and thus mark more experimental ideas or argument so that they seem more familiar, organic, or natural. You can focus on creating clarity in your thinking without having to worry about reinventing the writing form too — at least in your early drafts.

That’s one of the things someone like me can help you with. It’s our job as development editors to see the many different conventions, structures, shapes, and architectures of genres and to understand how they work as building blocks, modules to be moved around and built on. We can help make that part transparent so that you can concentrate on refining your scholarly thoughts, argumentation, and materials.

Until they don’t

But also, it would be very easy to fetishize conventions — if not particular conventions, then the idea of the use-value of the conventional — over experimentation, alternate epistemologies, freedom of thought, or genre fluidity. And I don’t want to be doing that here or in my practice. And I’m absolutely not suggesting anyone else do that elsewhere either.

Whether or not you want to adopt conventions for your field, genre, and scholarship, they exist. And even if you don’t choose to use those conventions, it can only benefit you to be cognizant of them, if solely in a purely pragmatic way.

Yet, and I want to be clear about this, calls for pragmatism are not neutral and pragmatism is never “purely” anything. Often when people, especially white people like me, say, just be pragmatic here, what they are saying — whether they’re aware of it or not — is, can you not just conform to white, western standards that we have chosen to consider neutral “professional” requirements? If you have to “experiment,” can you not do it within the accepted boundaries of this format too?

I don’t want to dismiss or erase the level of coercion that underlies pragmatism and conventions, as well as professionalization itself. So I want to approach this from a more liberationist angle: recognizing conventions available to you and determining what to adopt and what to leave aside. The choices you make in this area will be determined by your goal for this piece of writing and perhaps your career at large.

As widely recognized epistemological codes, conventions can be super useful for assessing professionalism or scholarly value. However, this also means that they can be wielded as key technologies for upholding the problems that come with gatekeeping, especially when it is largely invisible to many people holding up these codes.

Not only is that oppressive, exclusionary, and small-minded; it’s also boring and limiting. And who wants that?