Recovering the Covering Letter: Submitting Manuscripts to Scholarly Journals in the Twenty-First Century

Although most manuscripts submitted to scholarly journals are now sent electronically, some journals still expect covering letters to accompany these submissions. This essay, a retrospective on a piece by the same author that appeared in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing in 2004, recontextualizes and rearticulates components of effective covering letters for both unsolicited and expected manuscript submissions. By identifying pragmatic, rhetorical, and dialogic purposes that covering letters can and do serve, the piece revalues a liminal, occluded genre of academic writing that may eventually be superseded by technology.