Areo publishes thoughtful essays from a variety of perspectives compatible with broadly liberal and humanist values. It places particular priority on evidence and reason centred pieces. Our authors are intellectually, professionally and ideologically diverse. We publish academics, journalists, aspiring writers and thinkers with liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, religious and non-religious viewpoints. As much as possible, Areo tries to avoid polarizing tribalistic stances and prioritizes intellectual balance, charity, honesty and rigor.
If you have something to say that is engaging, original, and thoughtful, describe the thesis of your piece in a few sentences and then send the completed work to submissions@areomagazine.com as either a Microsoft Word document, Apple Pages document, or in the body of your email.
Please follow our style guide.
Style Guide
Spelling
Areo uses American English. That means several things: Words like “favour” are now “favor,” words which usually end in an “ise” will now end in “ize.” An example of this “marginalize” as opposed to “marginalise.” You get the idea.
Punctuation
Please do not just use the hyphen button for all types of hyphens and dashes. Rather, use these appropriately:
Em dash: — used when separating sentence segments. To create an em dash on Macintosh use “shift” + “alt/option” + “-” together. For a Windows machine use “ctrl” + “option” + “-”.
En dash: – used between sequences and numbers e.g. 135–139 pages. To create an en dash on Macintosh use “alt/option” + “-” together. For a Windows machine an en dash is a little more difficult. You can find the instructions here.
Dash: – used for hyphenation e.g. “slow-witted.” We hope you know where to find that on a keyboard!
Spacing
Please don’t use double spacing after periods and full stops. One space will do.
Quotations
We use double quotes. Yes, we know it’s not “correct.” But when you are quoting someone, their words go inside of double quotes. When you want to emphasize a word, you should use double quotes as well as opposed to single (‘ ’) quotes. Even better, if you want to emphasize something use italics.
When including a quote that is more than three lines longs, indent it without quotes.
Additionally, make sure your commas, full-stops, and question marks go inside the quotation marks.
Links
Please ensure that the draft you send us has text which is already hyperlinked.
For example don’t send us this:
Areo has a style guide on their website for submissions (www.areomagazine.com/submissions).
Instead:
Areo has a style guide on their website for submissions.
References
Please do not use footnotes, endnotes or a bibliography but incorporate all references into the body of the work. For example,
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes, “For most of the history of civilisation, the practice of slavery was the rule rather than the exception.”
Page numbers are unnecessary.
Peculiars
The names of publications should be italicized. But we omit the “The” in front of publication names. For example, The New Yorker, will be the New Yorker, The New York Times will be the New York Times.
The names of essays and articles are in quotes, not italicized. Book, TV, and movie titles are italicized, not in quotes.
Editing
We reserve the right to make minor cuts and changes to improve the readability of the prose. Any substantial changes will be discussed with the author.
Please allow us two weeks to get back to you. If the submission is urgent or timely, make that clear. If you don’t hear back from us, please consider another outlet for publication.
For questions, comments, crises, concerns: helen.pluckrose@areomagazine.com