Do you have ideas waiting to be heard? A perspective that deserves a broader audience? We have exciting news for you: Clearer Thinking is accepting submissions for articles for our website and newsletter!
But why should you consider writing for Clearer Thinking?
Get Paid for Your Passion: Every query that we approve to turn into a full-length article will receive compensation of $50, and $50 when we receive the full article you proposed in the query. If we decide to publish your final article, you will receive an additional $100. That’s a total of $200 in compensation!
Exposure for your work: If your submission is selected for publication, it will go to our active community and appear on our blog. Right now, our newsletter has over 260,000 subscribers. Your words, ideas, and perspectives will be showcased to a readership eager to learn and engage.
Flexibility in Submission: Whether you have a complete article, just an abstract, or even a rough outline, we're open to it all! You don't have to invest time in crafting a full article from the get-go. Pitch us your idea, and if we accept it, then we can collaborate to bring it to life!
No Need to Start from Scratch: Have a gem of an article already written and showcased on your personal site? Perfect! We welcome the submission of your existing work (as long as it hasn't been published before other than on your personal website). Let's give your masterpieces a bigger platform.
General Guidelines
Clearer Thinking publishes articles (blog posts) on various topics, typically taking an evidence-based or research-guided approach. We welcome submissions of high-quality original writing addressing any of the following topics:
Practical concepts from psychology, philosophy, or social science that people can use to improve their everyday lives or better understand the world that are not yet covered on our site.
Applied rationality, critical thinking, or philosophy concepts that most people would find valuable to know.
Effective altruism (EA), evidence-based giving, and/or existential risk-related concepts yet to be covered on our site that many people would find valuable to know.
Self-improvement techniques (especially evidence-based ones) that are likely helpful to many people (e.g., practices drawn from CBT, ACT, DBT, Interpersonal Therapy, Metacognitive Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, etc.)
Behavior change techniques that can help people act more in line with how their ideal self would act.
Concepts from mathematics, probability, statistics, computer science, economics, or science that can be usefully applied to everyday life for a wide variety of people.
Techniques for improving healthy self-esteem, increasing self-compassion, gaining self-understanding, reducing negative self-talk, improving helpful reflection, or helping people accurately assess their strengths and weaknesses.
Techniques for better understanding, effectively engaging with, or shifting one’s emotions, or for improving resilience.
Techniques for developing or maintaining good relationships with others, preventing unhelpful conflict, or navigating disagreement - including with colleagues, friends, family, or romantic partners.
Techniques for prioritizing between goals or managing multiple goals, or for improving prioritization or productivity.
Techniques for improving decision-making.
Techniques for helping people improve their predictions.
Besides fitting in one of these categories, all content we publish must:
Add value to the reader's life
Be aligned with our mission
Be well-reasoned and clearly written
Be evidence-based, research-guided, and/or well reasoned
Avoid making exaggerated claims, and appropriately caveat claims that are uncertain
Provide value to the reader early on in the article, so that even a reader who doesn't read the whole article is still likely to find it to be a valuable experience.
Please note that we avoid taking inflammatory and political stances. We prioritize careful reasoning, nuance, and clarity. Highly partisan pieces of writing are unlikely to be accepted.
To help determine whether your idea might be accepted, a good start is to familiarize yourself with some of the long-format content we have already published in our blog. He are a few examples:
Also, while the U.S. is the most common location for our audience, Clearer Thinking has readers from many parts of the world, so we encourage you to submit queries that will be meaningful to an international audience (but we only accept submissions in English).
There is no maximum or minimum word count, but we encourage you to aim for at least 1,500 words. We don't republish content that has appeared on other websites, though the exception we make is that it's fine to submit work that has previously appeared on your personal blog or equivalent (but please let us know that is the case when submitting).
Compensation & Submission Process
We offer compensation at three stages of the process, summing up to a total of $200 if you complete the entire process.
Stage 1: $50 when we approve your query to turn into a full-length article
Stage 2: $50 when we receive the full article you proposed in the query
Stage 3: $100 if we decide to publish your article (on our newsletter, website, or both).
All payments will be made via PayPal up to four weeks after you receive a confirmation from us that you qualified for each stage.
Below, you can read a detailed description of the full process.
1. Query Submission
Although we accept full article submissions in this stage, if you have not already written the piece, we strongly encourage you to first submit a query, which explains what you want to write about. This way, you avoid putting in too much work without knowing that it has a significant chance of being accepted.
You can submit a query via this form. Please read all the information on this page before submitting your query.
2. Query Review
After submitting your query, our team will review it to check whether it is aligned with our general guidelines, how much value we believe it will provide for our audience, whether it is too similar to the work we have published previously, and how it fits in our editorial calendar, writing style, and other factors.
The process will typically take between one to two weeks, depending on our work volume, our team capacity at that time, and the clarity of your ideas and sources. We might ask you additional questions before providing a final answer to your query.
A rejection doesn't imply that your idea or work is poor quality. Maybe what you've suggested does not fit our editorial plan or is too similar to other articles or tools we've already published or just not stylistically the best fit for our website (you can explore our prior articles using the search box on our website).
We aim to answer all emails, but unfortunately, we don't have the capacity to provide feedback or notes on rejected queries.
If we accept your query, you'll advance to the next stage, where you’ll be invited to write the article you proposed..
3. Article draft submission
This phase is not a full and in-depth review of your article draft but it is a read-through to see if it's the right fit for our website. It is also when you will receive an additional $50 (as long as you sign a contract giving us the rights to use it), regardless of whether we take it any further.
In this phase, we also might ask you some questions to better understand the content of your article draft before providing a final answer.
From that point on, you and our team will collaborate to edit your article draft (if needed).
4. Article Editing
If needed (in our experience, it is in most cases), your article will be copyedited for readability, concision, and to conform to house style. Since you will be credited as the article's author, you will be able to review and approve all changes before publication.
Keep in mind that we expect this step to be highly collaborative. At this point, we'll all want your article to be published, but we have high standards for quality, and we'll only publish what we consider highly valuable to our audience.
5. Publishing
Once we finish the editing, if we decide to publish the article, you'll also be compensated with an additional $100, regardless of when (or if) we'll release your work to our audience. Our team will take care of the publishing and let you know once it's done.
Please note that our team holds the right to publish it anytime we find it fits our editorial calendar, and we can also decide not to publish it. Please also note that if you accept payment from us for your work, you are giving us the unlimited right to use that work for any purpose we see fit.
It's also okay if the work submitted to us was previously published on their personal blog, but they can't submit work that was published anywhere other than on their personal blog.
After we publish it on our website, you can't publish it anywhere else.
Ready To Submit?
To submit your query, please fill out the form below:
Questions? Please reach out to us by filling out this contact form or replying to this e-mail.