Brain Labs Submission Guidelines
Cheat sheet to pitching your ideas on Brain Labs
Thank you for checking out Brain Labs! We’re excited to publish your submissions!
A request to writers
Before we get into the deets, a request.
Please read this article carefully!
We sometimes get submissions articles in which it’s apparent writers are not reading these guidelines carefully. Don’t be that writer!
Also, on that topic …
Please read the private notes thoroughly, especially the ones left by “AI”.
“AI” is my Python script which automates the low-hanging fruit of editing. Don’t rush through the AI notes. Read EACH sentence carefully. There are sometimes multiple actions required and it’s tedious for me to repeat the AI notes, because that defeats the purpose!
BL Standards
They’re high. Higher than in some other pubs. I expect exceptionally clean, lean prose as well as a high level of rigor. Take your time. Do it right.
If you don’t have extensive writing experience, getting published in BL is going to be tough. Really tough. If you aren’t an experienced writer, do yourself a favor. Read one or both of these before submitting to BL. I know it’s tempting to skip this step. Don’t.
How to submit
Please submit articles just as you would to other Medium pubs. To be added as a Brain Labs writer, add a comment to this article, with your Medium handle.
Also: please follow Brain Labs. Many thanks for doing this!
Read examples of what we publish
In my experience, people learn fastest by example. Here’s an example of the type of article we want to publish. You may have a wildly different tone or style. But you’re packing ideas!
But hey, there’s more! We’re also open to articles where you explain how a complex system works, particularly those we take for granted and sorta kinda have no freakin’ clue how they work.
What we welcome
- Your ideas and/or expertise about how the world works.
- Any subject. Examples — hard sciences, social sciences, politics, law, economics, technology, journalism/media, healthcare/medicine, business, environment, history, fine arts, performing arts, language, culture, education, philosophy, spirituality, religion, and sports. We love to publish ideas that live at the intersections of these disciplines.
- Important caveat about these subjects. We publish thought-provoking articles and avoid “how-to” articles, like “how to start a new business,”“how to clean up your hard drive,” etc.
- Clean, expressive, gramatically correct expository prose. Make logically rigorous arguments.
- Include citations as needed, as links or endnotes. Use these to back up your points, not to summarize someone else’s ideas.
- We are open to comics, graphics, charts, tables, images — anything visual to support your points.
- Humor? You bet! But not required.
- We are intrigued by exposition of patterns and anti-patterns.
- We really love counter-intuitive ideas. As long as they are backed up with facts/data.
What we avoid
- Fiction, poetry.
- Travelogues.
- Stilted execessively academic styles.
- Colloquialisms like “Now, let’s consider — .”
- To state the obvious, no racist/homophobic/gender-biased content.
- Also obvious: Avoid AI-generated text content. AI-generated graphics are fine if clearly labelled.
- Previously published articles.
- Stories must be edited thoroughly. No one is perfect, so a few mistakes are kosher, but we do expect that writers invest time to thoroughly edit their work before submitting. Add in another thoroughly and you’re good!
- Rants/screeds that lack logical exposition. If that’s your jam, try Fox “News.”
- Book reports. Citations are gold, but include your own ideas. Use books as scaffolding.
- Clickbait. Please don’t. We’re looking for substance. To borrow from the periodic table, we’re not looking for helium or hydrogen. Bring us your Einsteinium, your Neptunium!
- Technical procedures.
- Spirituality is ok, but we don’t publish content that is more advice than exploration.
- Simplistic “how to” listicles. See above point.
- Self help articles.
- Articles about making money.
- Weight loss, fitness, etc.
- Self promotion, particularly of anything in which you have a financial interest.
- Content about the Medium platform. There’s a big world out there! There are too many places you can bathe in the insular world of Medium. But not here.
- Articles based on media sources that have a reliability score of below 40 or are not between “Strong Left” and “Strong Right” inclusive on the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart.
- Bolded sections of text. Use all text “special effects” sparingly.
- Limit parentheses. They’re distracting and require extra cognitive energy to process.
Formatting, etc.
- Please include title (using “Big T” in editor) in title case.
- Please include subtitle (using “Little T” in editor) in sentence case.
- Please include a featured image, preferably following the subtitle.
- Kicker optional.
- Strongly suggest you do Alt-Text for images, but not required.
- Like every other pub, no images that have copyright problems.
- 750–4000 words. But a note about long pieces. If you’re throwing a long bomb, call the play, and have a clear pass route. No Hail Marys. Some articles are long because writers don’t edit. Writing is sculpting. Prune relentlessly. Make every syllable count.
- We sometimes use an automated editor controlled by a Python script, to pick off the low-hanging fruit (like, DOHHH, where is your subtitle?). But the real editing will be done by a human. Humans, right? Gotta love ’em!
One more thing
We enjoy editing. That includes teaching people what we know about writing clear expository prose. Still, it’s important that writers rigorously self-edit before submitting.
Use Grammarly or Hemingway to flag/fix errors. Grammarly is annoying, but it does flag basic errors. If you disagree with it’s suggestions, ignore them.
We see a lot of prose that is flabby. In the types of articles we publish, lean prose is king. What does that mean? Rigorously self-edit in order to eliminate unnecessary words.
OK, hands up if you flagged the error in my previous sentence! “In order to” — that’s flab. The sentence should read: Rigorously self-edit to eliminate unnecessary words.
That’s just one example.
Challenge yourself to see how many words you can cut without losing precision.
