The Telltale Confusions of “The Ascent’s” Submission Guidelines

And what these confusions say about consumer society

Publication guidelines make for a curious genre. An online publication will publish the website’s philosophy and standards. The editors of the more popular publications will feel they have nothing to hide since they’re obviously doing something right, so they’ll openly confess the criteria they use to judge submitted articles.

Suppose, though, the society itself is flawed so that to gain so many readers you must be doing something wrong in addition to making a lot of money and supplying so many readers with what they want to read. In that case, a more scrupulous or crafty editor might disguise the questionable standards that speak indirectly to what’s broadly wrong with the society.

Take, for example, the New York Times guidelines on submitting guest essays. There you’ll find mainly recommendations on how to meet basic journalistic standards. You’ll learn that this kind of article should be “an argument defined and substantiated with evidence,” or that it should “present findings, highlight problems and propose solutions to the public and to one another.”

As for “the best Opinion essays,” they “have a few things in common,” says the Times’ guideline:

they try to challenge and engage audiences who do not necessarily agree with the writer’s point of view. They give insight into complicated problems or anticipate big ideas. They start conversations, influence policy-makers and have an impact far beyond the pages of Times Opinion. They aspire to delight the reader with great writing and originality, and to open a window into a world we might not otherwise see.

Those guidelines are so basic and anodyne that they’re beyond criticism. Notice, though, how they differ from laying out the more hidden expectations, such as that submitted articles shouldn’t challenge the wealthy or the plutocratic power centers in the United States, which the New York Times implicitly defends. Revealing those standards in the Times would amount to a gaffe.

A Preference for Inoffensive Banalities

But online publications are often more naïve or complacent. Take, for instance, “The Ascent,” which has over 140,000 followers, and which proudly announces its editorial values even at the risk of revealing its fallacies.

The Ascent’s guidelines say its editors are looking for “authentic, personal storytelling,” since they believe that “everyone has a story to tell on the path to happiness & fulfillment, and those stories add value to the world.” The author’s “unique perspective” can “inform and inspire” readers about career changes, relationships, self-improvement, and so on.

The editors point out that, “The stories that perform best for us are rooted in firsthand experience and packed with tons of value in the form of personal lessons, actionable advice, and profound takeaways.” And they add that, “We want readers to walk away feeling empowered, ready to conquer any challenges they may face.”

That last restriction is the first sign of trouble since it’s a way of saying that submitted articles should be uplifting and should avoid disturbing the readers. If The Ascent’s writers sometimes tackle topics that can’t be responsibly presented without going into some unsettling detail, that publication’s treatment of those topics will have to whitewash the truth.

For example, what if the truth is that The Ascent’s readers aren’t as empowered and as capable as they think they are? What if our false sense of superiority were a leading cause of the damage we’re doing to the planet and indirectly to ourselves? What if a thoughtful, ethical writer’s responsibility were to burst the bubble of such complacency, not to pander to it with platitudes and flattery?

Anecdotes and Empirical Evidence

But the plot thickens when the editors go on to clarify their quality standards. The guidelines say the authors should ask themselves four questions before submitting their article, two of which interest me.

The first question is this one: “Is this story written from a personal perspective?” At first, it looks like the editors are just reiterating their preference for autobiographical stories, not for articles that deal directly with arguments and ideas, making the author’s personal background irrelevant.

That is, by this point The Ascent’s editors have already implied they’re not looking for scientific or for philosophical articles. They want authors to talk largely about themselves, because successful publications like this one have learned that that’s what average readers prefer. Readers want to feel like they’re just socializing with the author, to make the act of reading seem not so onerous, so the readers won’t be so tempted to switch over to YouTube to watch a brain-numbing cutesy animal video.

But beneath each of The Ascent’s four questions, the editors elaborate. Clarifying the first question, they say, “Does the writer provide empirical evidence to support or justify their claims? Is the story rooted in real-world knowledge or experience?”

Now this is embarrassing. Can you spot the fallacy that the editors should have tried to hide, the one that speaks to a much larger problem with the self-help industry and with “personal storytelling” in general? Here it is in a nutshell: The Ascent identifies the presenting of a “personal perspective” with the providing of “empirical evidence” to support the article’s claims. Alas, anecdotes aren’t “empirical” in the sense of being experimental.

Let’s say I write a personal story about how I’m glad movie theaters may shut down due to the fallout from Covid-19, because I found beforehand that too many patrons liked to talk during the movie or to read their email on their phones in the darkened theater. Suppose I fill the article with anecdotes about my personal experience, and I conclude that movie theaters are bad, based on those anecdotes or “stories.”

Would such an article be backed up by “empirical evidence”? Not by a longshot. The anecdotes would be empirical in the rudimentary sense that they would derive from my sense experience. But the stories shouldn’t be thought of as compelling evidence to convince a reader that the conclusion is rationally justified. That’s what science is for. Science builds on observations with experiments that test hypotheses. Philosophical reasoning, too, can help discover the truth, by conducting thought experiments or by following chains of reasoning with some rigor.

But if I say, “I was annoyed a few times in a movie theater when some of the patrons kept talking and wouldn’t turn off their phones,” I wouldn’t be rationally justified in concluding on that anecdotal basis that all movie theaters should be shut down. All my anecdotes would indicate is that that’s how I feel about the matter. My “personal story” would tell the reader more about me than about movie theaters. And assuming the author isn’t a celebrity, why would readers want to know mainly about an author’s feelings?

All of which is obscured by this confused, postmodern bias for personal stories, which shows up in The Ascent’s submission guidelines. The presumption is that truth reduces to feelings anyway, that objectivity is impossible, so if you talk about your feelings about movie theaters, that’s as good as talking about the theaters themselves. But if that’s The Ascent’s viewpoint, the editors shouldn’t lean so heavily on the reference to “empirical evidence,” as though such evidence or old-fashioned journalistic standards still matter to postmodern relativists.

For the rest of us who understand the difference between an anecdote and empirical, rationally obtained evidence, we can look at The Ascent’s equivocation and smile.

Self-Empowerment and Subversion

Moving on, here’s the second question together with the elaboration: “Is this story written for the reader? Does it provide meaningful advice, offer an original take on an important issue, or share a new insight or perspective beyond conventional wisdom?”

What strikes me about this part of the guideline is that the preference for “a new insight” or for a “perspective beyond conventional wisdom” seems to contradict the earlier, more general advice that the authors should leave their readers “feeling empowered, ready to conquer any challenges they may face.”

Surely, that’s what conventional wisdom is for, to reassure the masses to keep the peace. Conventional wisdom has it that the New York Times is among the greatest newspapers because its writers follow the highest journalistic standards. This is the newspaper’s mystique which reassures discerning readers.

But then you read a little more widely and discover that journalistic standards themselves have plummeted in recent decades, largely because of the rise of postmodern hyperskepticism, identity politics, the capitalistic capture of gatekeepers, and competition from the infantilizing internet. Thus, what the Times is really doing is protecting the neoliberal status quo to appeal to the newspaper’s well-connected readers, not to apply the academic value of neutrality or to fulfill the Constitutional obligation to challenge the power elites to maintain the democracy’s health.

If readers are reading The Ascent, they evidently don’t want to be challenged. They want “value,” which here means something like utility in the neoclassical economist’s sense. This value is just whatever we actually want even if we’ve been conned or demagogued or coerced into wanting it. In short, there’s no value judgment of these values; they’re automatically accepted as whatever they are.

If we consume enough uplifting corporate media, and our First World private lives seem to be going well enough, we end up with the values you’d expect “empowered” consumers to have. We want our articles to have “actionable takeaways” because we’re men and women of action. Thinking should be left to the outer darkness of the academy, we presume. We solve problems because our society’s torrent of infotainment has led us to believe that our way of life is progressive. We’re making things better just by participating in our society, such as by reading The Ascent’s helpful little personal stories.

Then a thinker comes along and spoils the party with reminders about environmentalism, the holocaust of the Anthropocene, and the philosophical and scientific undermining of religious myths.

In any case, these readers can’t have it both ways: either they want to feel empowered and ready to conquer all challenges or they’re ready to challenge conventional opinions. The progressive consumer’s empowerment and complacency are backed up by little more than conventional pseudo-wisdom. Real wisdom is typically subversive, which is why it’s kept in the academy and doesn’t sell well.

Exposing the Underbelly

What have we learned, then, from this trip through The Ascent’s submission guidelines? We’ve learned that the late-modern consumer society that The Ascent represents has become so decadent that some of its spokespeople are unashamed of the confusions that pass for their editorial principles.

As they stand, the guidelines are incoherent, which means they count for next to nothing. Maybe this is why roughly half of The Ascent’s daily publications are trite listicles. The editors say they want “original takes on important issues,” but prospective writers ignore such balderdash, focusing on the plainer truth that because The Ascent is popular, this publication must cater to popular opinions, which automatically makes most of the articles published by The Ascent superficial and lame.

Regardless of what the editors say they want in their stumbling fashion, writers need merely note The Ascent’s tens of thousands of followers to realize that this publication effectively puts out so much fluff and vain boosterism.

Incidentally, I’ve exposed similar ironies in “Mind Cafe’s” guidelines, so stay tuned for further entries in this series on the unabashed exposers of the underbelly of popular online publications.