We’re always looking for more good articles to print. If you’re considering contributing to The Undercurrent, it will be helpful for you to familiarize yourself with (a) the submission process, (b) some general guidelines pertaining to the nature and scope of the paper, and (c) the stipulations you must accept for us to publish your piece.

What Happens

The first thing you should do if you’re interested in submitting is contact us and let us know. Sometime during your writing process you should send us an informal abstract, outline, or other form of summary. This lets us plan our spread and also gives us a chance to send you helpful pointers and ideas right from the beginning.

Once you have submitted a piece, each member of the staff reads it and gives his general impression and opinion to the rest of the staff. We then vote on the status of the your piece. There are three possibilities: acceptance, pending acceptance, or rejection.

Acceptance, as you might have guessed, means that we consider your piece good enough for publication. There will in all likelihood be minor revisions, but nothing substantial.

Pending acceptance means that we consider the piece to be promising but not good enough for publication. We will work with you and help you rewrite the piece, offering specific comments on what needs to be improved and how. But until those changes are made to our satisfaction, the piece will not be printed in The Undercurrent. We will vote again on each substantial rewrite.

Rejection means that the piece is unacceptable. There may be the germs of a good article, but it would have to be essentially completely rewritten in order to be accepted. Sometimes we will reject a piece and work with the author to write and submit an essentially new piece.

Within a week of submitting a first draft, we will inform you of our decision. At this point we will have assigned a single editor to oversee revisions and act as a liason between you and the staff. The initial comments your editor sends you will be extensive, including any major clarifications, additions, or structural changes that will be required for rewrites.

Over the next two to three weeks, you will work with your editor to finalize the piece for publication. You should be prepared to edit your article several times before we go to press. The number of drafts varies quite a bit, usually between four and ten, with the amount of change per draft also variable. Articles are edited for style, tone, philosophical correctness, and of course clarity. The first one or two edits will be the most time-consuming. There are very, very few exceptions to this rule, so if you can’t make the time commitment, don’t submit your article.

Feel free to contact us with any questions about the editing process.

General Guidelines

As mentioned above, if you’re interested in submitting something, definitely contact us. This counts doubly if you’re planning on writing a new piece. We often have ideas and helpful advice right from the start. Here are some general guidelines that you should be aware of.

First and foremost, remember that you are writing for a college audience. Your target audience is a 19-year old with little or no knowledge of Objectivism. This does not mean you should dumb down your articles; it simply means that your arguments will need to be comprehensible to someone with this context.

Our articles run the gamut from timely to timeless, but we like to keep as current as possible. Students are more likely to pick up and read an article on a hot issue. So if you’re looking for an article topic, then look to the headlines. You can also contact us as we always have more ideas for articles than time to write them. We also have an extensive database of potential articles here. It is regularly updated and a great resource for topic ideas.

In general you should not submit esthetic reviews, i.e. film or novel reviews. However, you can use esthetic works to talk about larger cultural trends. The easiest way to do this is to look at the culture’s reaction to a given work of art. This allows you to bypass the tasks of identifying a theme, objectively evaluating the artwork, and so on–tasks which are very difficult and in general done improperly. (Not that we at The Undercurrent HQ think we can do much better.) There may be other ways to circumvent this problem and we’re always open to suggestions. A good rule of thumb is to contact us first if you want to write on something esthetic.

We encourage humor and wit, but your piece should not be essentially a humor piece. It should be essentially an argument. Also the tone of your humor should be appropriate to a publication that takes ideas seriously; if the humor is too malevolent or cynical, we may insist that you change it.

Article length: the shorter your article, the better. That being said, if you have an idea for a piece that absolutely requires 2,000 words, then run it by us. Our pieces typically run a little longer than the 750 word standard op-ed as is.

Stipulations

There are two important conditions in writing for The Undercurrent that you should be aware of.

The first is that we retain the copyright of any piece we publish for three months. This means that neither you the writer agree not to publish the piece anywhere else without our explicit permission for three months. (We are a reasonable bunch of people, and if you have some need to reproduce your piece elsewhere then we will probably let you, but we retain the right to deny a reproduction.) You will be allowed to post it on your personal blog if you have one, with the only stipulation being that you link to the-undercurrent.com somewhere in the post.

The second is in regards to minor changes that we may make without notifying you. The final stage of editing is any last-minute copyediting, which is done just before the publication deadline. Though we copyedit through the process, we will often catch many small issues of wording, grammar, and syntax that we have missed so far in the hours and minutes right before we go to press. If there is no time to get your approval, and if in the judgment of our editors the change is in step with the meaning and intent of the piece, we will go ahead and make the change without notification. If you are uncomfortable with this, you have two options:

1. Give us your cell phone number and permission to call you at all hours of the night in the days before publication. If you do this then we can run any changes by you at our convenience (and your probable inconvenience).

2. Insist that your piece be published as is, with no changes without your notification. We discourage this because it is detrimental to the piece and to our publication to leave in typos or ambiguities in meaning. But we leave it ultimately up to you. Be warned that if we feel there is too much unclarity, and we cannot get in touch with you, that we may pull your piece at the last minute or delay its publication by a month.