More about my overly-picky editorial demands

The #1 piece of advice I can give you is never to submit a first or second draft. If you do, rivers will run dry in vulnerable foreign countries; your favorite sports team will fail to score any points against their most hated rival; and most importantly, your writing is unlikely to be accepted.

You must ruthlessly and iteratively revise and edit your writing. Use a self-editing checklist (many are available online). Start with structural issues that affect the piece as a whole (e.g. Is there extraneous information that could be eliminated? Are the voice and style consistent throughout the piece?), then move on to line and copy editing (e.g. Is there a mix of sentence lengths and structures? Are there any word choices that could be improved?), and finally proofreading for spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Put your self-edited draft aside for at least a few days, and ideally for a few weeks, and come back to it with fresh eyes. Refer to the self-editing checklist again to make sure you didn't miss anything. Read your piece out loud or have someone read it to you. Try to imagine that you aren't familiar with the story. Are there parts that are boring or confusing? Make especially sure your title and intro are interesting. Anthology readers aren't a captive audience. Grip them from the very first word and don't let them go until the last. Look up "throat clearing in writing" and don't do it! Try reading sentence by sentence from the end to the beginning to better catch sentence- and word-level problems. Revise again as necessary.

When you have taken the piece as far as you can on your own, get feedback from writing peers, in-person workshops, and/or critique sites such as critique.org. Incorporate only the changes that make sense to you, but make sure you don't discount valuable feedback because it hurts your feelings.

Regardless of how long and arduous the process was to complete a "final" draft, set it aside and come back to it later for one last read-through before submitting. If you're new to editing your work, you may be surprised how common it is to find one or more mistakes even this late in the editting proccess (sic).

On that note, I'd like to see more submissions that incorporate humor. No matter how serious the subject, don't be afraid of poking fun at yourself and others, acknowledging the absurdity of situations, or even engaging in silly word play. Humor allows your readers to take a break from the gravity of subjects like sexual harrassment or glass ceilings; breathe; and re-engage. For readers who disagree with you or are resistant to a point you're making, humor may disarm them and make them more open to what you have to say.

The successful essay will include a story with sensory details that allow readers to imagine themselves in your place, as well as reflections on your experiences. I'm seeing pieces that fail on each side: Some that are simply anecdotes with no context or internality--something that you might share with coworkers in the break room after an interesting weekend--and some that are excessively internal or abstract. Neither extreme is desirable.

To make an anecdote into an essay, expand the scope. Make sure there's a narrative arc (a beginning, middle, and end). Contextualize your experiences both within your own life and within society. Pose at least some of the following questions to yourself: How did I feel about these experiences at the time? How do I feel now? If I could do it again, what would I change? How did my experiences change me? What other episodes from my life or others' am I reminded of? How prevalent are these problems, and how can they be addressed? Is there relevant research?

To correct overly-abstract writing, add action, dialogue, and/or description. Avoid sentences like "Jack was attractive" or "Jill criticized everything I did." Instead of telling your reader what to think or feel, lead them to it through sharing the experiences that made you think or feel the way you do. Show us the specifics of how Jack looks. Describe the expression on Jill's face, and let us hear what she said to you. Your readers will decide for themselves whether Jack is attractive or Jill is critical.

Of course, what constitutes excellent writing depends on the personal taste of the reader as well as the competence of the writer. Two of my favorite essayists are Marjorie Williams and Poe Ballantine. It may be of more use to read samples of those authors' work than it would be for me to write at length about what makes me say Yes to an essay. I can't recommend Williams' book The Woman at the Washington Zoo highly enough. You can access many of Poe's short pieces on the Sun website: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/contributors/poe-ballantine. If you read nothing else, try "Nomads" or "No Talking to Imaginary People."

If you've made it to the end of this, you're awesome and I want to hear from you.