Tell the story: How to write for American Ethnologist

To write a successful article for a major anthropology journal, authors can employ a number of strategies. The first and most essential is to familiarize themselves with the journal's mission. For AE, authors must ground their arguments in current debates in the discipline, make a clear contribution to anthropological theory, support this contribution with ethnography, and demonstrate its relevance to contemporary sociocultural problems. Moreover, AE authors must cite other authors appropriately, cohesively structure the article, and avoid various problems that afflict much of academic writing—such as evasive metadiscourse, inflated diction, serial citation, and unnecessary literature reviews. To maximize the article's online discoverability, authors should judiciously compose their titles and abstracts and carefully choose their accompanying keywords.