Posting on RAIL
The point of the blog is to serve the argumentation community. Hence RAIL welcomes short articles, research notes, conference reports, contributions, CFPs, book or article reviews, and announcements relevant to the readership. If you have something you’d like to get posted here, simply, send an e-mail containing all the pertinent information.
Guidelines for Submissions
- Real names and institutional affiliation(s) (if any) are required and will accompany all posted submissions.
- Right now the language of RAIL is English.
- RAIL is a scholarly blog, not a political blog. Submissions that are overly polemic in tone will be refused (there are plenty of other places online for that). It is the official policy of RAIL to be open to scholars of diverse political positions from across the political spectrum. Social commentary from any perspective is welcome but only if the post has explicit, scholarly relevance to argumentation (of whatever theoretical approach), informal logic, or a clearly defined and supported conception of critical thinking. Appropriate connections to the literature are encouraged as the best way to demonstrate that relevance.
- If your post is clearly related to argumentation theory, informal logic or critical thinking, isn’t gratuitously or personally offensive (near as I can tell, anyway), and is at least decently written, it’s going up. That said, I reserve the editorial capacity to refuse submissions for the usual sorts of reasons to which academics are accustomed.
Part of the point of RAIL is to have a place online for argumentation scholars from across disciplines and theoretical orientations to converse about all things argumentation theory. I think of it like the electronic version of the kind of conversation one might have between sessions at a major conference. With that in mind, here are the (probably pretty common-sense):
Guidelines for Comments
- Stay on topic
- We ♥ Grice’s Maxims
- Keep it civil (Yes, I know that norms of civility are controversial. Yes, it’s the policy anyway. See above.)
- Real names are encouraged (because it’s a little weird to have a serious conversation with someone called, e.g. CrayzeeKillerKantian99) but they are not required.
