How advice columns work

A number of people have noticed that the question I ran yesterday about the woman who is disturbed by her sister's dishabille also appeared in "Ask Amy" on August 8. I'd seen that in comments and planned to point it out when I wrote my response next Tuesday, but my editor asked me to address it now, as apparently she is getting letters from people convinced that there is some sort of fraud going on.

It's always good to see the citizens hold the press accountable to high standards, and it's something I wish happened more, but in this particular case, there's not a lot of there there, to quote Gertrude Stein. Lots of people send in letters to multiple advice columns at the same time. There's a strict rule in academia about multiple submissions to scholarly journals, but there's not much we advice columnists can do about it--it's not as though we have some sort of central clearinghouse of questions, nor does every single advice columnist read every other advice columnist every day to ensure that there are no repeats. (Given different publication schedules and lead times, even if we did, that wouldn't prevent the occasional duplication.) As a result, it's not uncommon for two advice columnists to run the same question within days of each other--or on the very same day, such as this "Dear Cary" question that also appeared in "Dear Prudence" (second one down). A quick Google search on "advice column" and "same question" also revealed this gem from Gawker: it appears that the same question ran in both "Dear Prudence" and "Ask Amy," within months of each other--but the male half of the disagreeing couple wrote to Prudie, and the woman to Amy!

(It's possible on that one, of course, that the letter-writer was the same in both cases, and was playing a gag. There isn't much we can do about that, either. Advice columnists don't make up the questions, but the people who send the questions in might. My editor will confirm before a question is published that the writer is indeed M.S. from Mansfield and the author of the question, but she isn't going to send a team of fact-checkers to M.S.'s house to verify that her mother-in-law is, in fact, as annoying as M.S. says she is.)

And there you have it. There's no conspiracy, no plagiarism, no great cabal of yentas working behind the scenes to brainwash the American populace by planting the same narratives in their collective subconscious. (Though that might be a fun idea for a science-fiction short story--and if any of you write it, I'd love to read it!) There's just people who figure, hey, I've got a problem, and they send it in to every advice columnist they've heard of. That probably didn't happen quite so much when people had to actually write or type their letters and pay for postage, but when 99.9% of questions are e-mailed, there's no cost to the advice-seeker to send the same question in to Cary, Prudie, Amy, Margo, Randy, Carolyn, Dan Savage, Miss Manners, and me. And it's not like it's always a bad thing, because then readers can see who edits questions heavily and who doesn't, and directly compare different advice styles. How much would you like to see Dan Savage and Miss Manners tackle the same question? I would pay money for that.

But why, the still-unconvinced reader cries--then why, if you all allegedly receive so many letters, do you choose the same ones and leave so many unanswered?

Because really good questions, from the columnist's point of view, are in fact somewhat rare. I discuss this a bit on "How to Get a Question in 'Miss Conduct'" posts listed on the sidebar, and invited my blog readers to discuss what questions they like to respond to recently. A good question is one that is well written, with enough relevant details included that there's something to grab onto, but still succinct. It should pose a problem that can be looked at from at least two angles. It should, ideally, have a moral element to it. It should be general enough that readers who don't face that particular situation might still learn from it, and particular enough that the general readership will feel that they have heard an interesting little story. And it should not be a question that the columnist receives several versions of every week. (If you want to know how much to spend on a wedding present, or what to do about the person in the cubicle next to you who eats/talks/chews gum/coughs/breathes too loudly, here's my advice: write to someone who has just started an advice column. Because I'm not answering those questions ever again, and neither is anyone else who's been in the business for more than a year.)

We get a lot of questions, but we get very, very few that satisfy enough of the criteria above to publish. So it's natural that those few that do are likely to get picked out of the pile by more than one of us.

And that's the story.