Introduction

Harness the Power of Language

MY FRIEND OSCAR was in the middle of an interview for a job as a professor when a comment from a potential colleague stopped him in his tracks.

(His name, like all the names in this book that don’t come from the public domain, has been changed.)

This was on Day 2 of his “campus visit,” which might sound casual, but is actually pretty intense. When you’re a finalist for a professor position, you go and visit the college for a few days. You give a talk, you have hours and hours of meetings, and you eat every meal with people who are evaluating you. You’re on your best behavior from morning until night. It’s exhausting.

So, Oscar is having lunch with a professor I’m going to call John, who might end up being one of his colleagues for the rest of his working life. (Seriously, these are high-stakes interviews. Many of the people evaluating you are trying to decide if they would like to work with you for the next twenty or thirty years.) And then John looks at Oscar’s wedding ring and says a thing that Oscar has been dreading.

“I bet your wife would love those bungalows on the south side of town.”

Wife.

Problem is, Oscar is gay. And he’s married to a man.

So, there’s his husband, Fred. But no wife.

Imagine what it’s like to be in Oscar’s position. Maybe you don’t have to imagine, because something similar has already happened to you.

Now that John, his interviewer, has assumed he’s talking to a person who has a wife, Oscar has two basic choices for his next conversational turn. And neither of them are good ones.

This is some serious stuff to consider, especially in the middle of a job interview where you’re trying to make a good impression and also trying to figure out if you actually want the job.

And Oscar’s dilemma is all because of one word. One non-inclusive word.

Wife.

If John had simply said “spouse” instead of “wife,” there would have been no dilemma for Oscar. In fact, he would probably have noticed the inclusive word choice and thought something like “Oh, John didn’t assume I’m straight! That’s cool. Looks like this is a department that keeps in mind that some of us are LGBTQ+.”

Just one word can be the difference between Oscar feeling welcomed and seen or feeling erased and possibly unsafe.

A single word can change the course of an interview, a job, a relationship. When you know the Principles of Inclusive Language, you can choose words that are actually as polite, respectful, and welcoming as you want them to be.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ETIQUETTE

There is a new twenty-first-century etiquette. We are seeing new words, new norms, and new expectations. And being polite means using inclusive language, now more than ever. In many ways, the new etiquette is like older versions, but with one major update: it is now expected that we will take into consideration people whose perspectives have historically been ignored, erased, or dismissed as less important.

I hear from a lot of people that they feel a bit at sea when it comes to this new etiquette. They tell me that it suddenly feels as if what used to be just fine is now enough to get them strongly criticized. That language, especially language that they’re using publicly, now feels like a minefield—and they’re caught in the middle without a map.

Executives tell me that they’re anxious about saying the wrong thing when they address the whole company in all-hands meetings or do interviews with journalists. They’re surprised and unhappy about the negative comments they get on Slack from their younger employees or at getting called out on Twitter.

One CEO confessed, “I just don’t want to ‘get cancelled’ for saying the wrong thing. So now I’m afraid to say anything involving ‘difficult’ topics.” But his employees noticed that he was avoiding these topics, and it lowered their trust in him and in the company.

PR people and marketers tell me they’re concerned that their press releases and ad campaigns will be accidentally offensive and bring the wrath of the internet down on their heads.

One digital marker worried, “What if our campaigns are unintentionally racist or sexist in ways we’re just not seeing? Because, frankly, our team just isn’t that diverse. I’m afraid we’re going to turn off potential customers.”

Heads of HR tell me they’re concerned that they’re losing potentially great hires because recruiters are offending them or signaling that the company culture won’t welcome them.

A VP of Talent Acquisition told me they were frustrated. “So, a recruiter misgendered a top candidate in an interview the other day, saying things like ‘a woman like you’ and ‘she.’ That candidate just withdrew from consideration, saying they don’t want to work for a company that’s so insensitive. They said they only want to work somewhere they’ll feel comfortable so they can actually focus on their job.”

Grandparents tell me they’re nervous talking to their grandkids, especially when it comes to gender and sexual orientation. They see that the landscape has shifted, but they don’t quite know how.

“My granddaughter announced that she’s something called nonbinary? And she changed her name from Sophie, which is a perfectly lovely name, to some kind of ridiculous name she says is gender neutral. And they tell me I’m wrong for calling her ‘she’? But she’s my baby girl!” With this attitude and these language choices, their relationship with their grandchild is likely to be awkward and low on trust, and it may become increasingly distant.

Some people in their forties and older tell me that they sometimes just don’t understand their younger colleagues and the rules they’re playing by. (Others have been engaging in these kinds of inclusive practices for a while, so they are already comfortable.) And some autistic people tell me that it can be frustrating to have communication rules that already feel unnatural to them shift without explicit notification or explanation as to why.

An engineer in his fifties objected: “Why should I include my pronouns in my Slack profile and in my Zoom window? I’m not also announcing to everyone that I’m gay.” His refusal to adopt the new etiquette, combined with his lack of awareness of the reasons for normalizing pronoun presentation, is negatively impacting his work relationships.

It’s no fun to feel the way Oscar did in that interview, but it’s also no fun to feel like you have to constantly second-guess everything you say—or to feel so worried that you avoid saying anything at all.

Luckily, all of this complicated business around modern etiquette isn’t actually all that complicated once you understand the Principles of Inclusive Language. And that’s exactly what I’m going to share in the pages to come: the tools that will allow you to communicate with confidence.

• • •

When you were a kid, adults probably gave you some basic dos and don’ts. For example, many English-speaking American parents say things like:

But even these rules, which might seem obvious if they were handed down to you as a child, aren’t foolproof.

Because what’s appropriate depends on context.

For example, among friends, it can be a sign of closeness to just ask for or take something without a more formal sounding “please” or “thank you” attached to it. And some people may think elbows on the table are just fine. What’s more, addressing someone as “sir” when they aren’t male or “ma’am” when they aren’t female won’t express respectful politeness but instead is likely to cause irritation, anger, or pain. Finally, a person may come from a culture in which jumping in while someone is still speaking is a sign of engagement and shows that the conversation is going well.

You’ve spent your lifetime developing a sense of what’s appropriate. You might not realize it, but you are incredibly sensitive to context. When you’re assessing a situation and adjusting your behavior, you’re taking into account all kinds of factors. Things like

• how many people are involved and how close you are to them;

• where you are and if you’re communicating in person or via technology;

• the power dynamics;

• the type of interaction (like a meeting, a face-to-face conversation, a series of text messages, a social media post); or

• the identity characteristics of the people involved.

Note that some autistic people may be assessing different contextual factors than allistic people (allistic is a useful term that describes people who specifically are not autistic; neurodivergent is too broad to use in this way). For example, allistic people are likely to interpret the concept of social in terms of negotiating social status and identifying power gradients. But autistic people are likely to interpret social as working collaboratively in an interaction where the primary goal is to learn from one another.¹

Related to this is a communication feature commonly called monologuing. This is where an autistic speaker shares a large amount of highly detailed and often specialized information on a particular topic—a topic that might be considered a special interest. For the autistic person, this way of speaking is an informational way of socializing. It signals interest and engagement in the conversation and is understood as social due to the sharing and learning of information. But for an allistic listener, the monologuing may not seem like social interest and instead can be seen as rude, self-centered, and hogging of the conversational floor.

What’s considered appropriate or acceptable changes based the contextual factors I just listed and a whole bunch more. The calculus to figure out what is appropriate is subtle, complicated, and frequently shifting. In fact, I used to teach entire graduate courses on how to analyze the many ways that context affects what people say and how they say it.

So when people come to me looking for a straightforward list of inclusive language dos and don’ts, I tell them: I wish it was that simple.

Sometimes they ask, “Can’t you just tell me the words I shouldn’t use and the words I should use in their place?”

The answer is: sure, for some things. But often, what’s appropriate changes so much based on context that it’s just too complicated to make straightforward lists.

What’s more, language evolves and changes over time. Some words that were considered acceptable just a few years ago are seen as less desirable or even unacceptable today. And this is a cycle that keeps on going.

Fortunately, you don’t need to keep up on every trend or change to become proficient in twenty-first-century etiquette. And there is a better way to manage this information than only using long lists of words and phrases (though I have included a helpful list of suggested substitutions in the Resources section at the end of this book).

After reading this book, you will be able to use my Six Principles of Inclusive Language, which are based on the scientific concepts at the heart of linguistic anthropology, to confidently navigate whatever communication context you may find yourself in—now or in the future.

EVERYTHING YOU SAY
AFFECTS YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

People cause pain every day by using problematic language.

Most of the time, when people are causing pain it’s because they don’t realize how their words are landing. Why is it so common for well-intentioned people to say hurtful things? It’s because most people haven’t been taught how language actually works.

I used to be one of those people. Even though I had been an English major in college and worked as a technical writer afterward, I didn’t understand the real inner workings of language, and I still believed all kinds of myths that scientists of language know are actually false.

For example, I thought that the meaning of language was found only in semantics. So you could learn everything you needed to make good word choices by looking in a dictionary.

I also thought that words were pretty much the same for everybody—so if a word wasn’t problematic for me, it was hard for me to understand why it might be a problem for someone else. “I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me,” I would think. “Aren’t they just being humorless? Or oversensitive?”

And I thought that some dialects were just better than others, and that your pronunciation and grammar made you sound either smarter or dumber. I grew up in New York and went to college in North Carolina, a state where many people have what might be called a “strong Southern accent.” And because of my misconceptions about dialects, my first few weeks of college were absolutely mind-blowing. In my seminars, I heard people speaking with accents that I had been raised to think of as sounding “unintelligent.” And speaking with these accents, they made comments that were unbelievably insightful and far more sophisticated than anything I had been thinking. It took me many months to bring my mental models into better alignment with the reality around me. I had to learn to stop using dialect stereotypes to judge people’s intelligence or contributions.

What’s more, I thought that writing “he or she” instead of just “he” was enough to accurately represent gender. “There, I fixed it,” I would think. “It’s no longer a masculine word masquerading as representing everybody. Now everyone is actually represented.” I had no idea that nonbinary people even existed, even though there are 4,000 years of texts and descriptions of cultural practices, dating back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, that record genders well beyond the binary.²

All of this changed after I became a linguistic anthropologist and started studying language and bias.³ Now I understand a lot more about how language works, and it has changed my life for the better. I have way more insight. And way more control.

Don’t get me wrong, I still make mistakes when it comes to inclusive language. I’m only human. And I still struggle with the legacy of the culture I was raised in, where it was generally acceptable to marginalize or dismiss all kinds of people, to not care about their perspectives or their feelings.

But I’ve learned how to identify bias “hot spots” and avoid them. How to create checklists for my writing and talks. And how to create new habits so when I go on autopilot (which happens a lot when we speak), my default language is (usually) the more inclusive option.

I’ve written this book so I can share some of the most important things I’ve learned about language with you so you also can gain new insights and gain more control over your language. Then it’s actually doing what you want it to do.

Here is one of the most important things I’ve learned:

You might have been raised to think that words can’t do much harm, or that words and actions are completely different things. (This shows up in sayings like “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”)

But every time you use language to interact with someone, you are affecting your relationship with that person. Every single thing you say or write can cause a relationship to improve or deteriorate. (In this book, I am focusing on examples in spoken and written English. But like now, when I’m talking more generally about language and use words such as say, I am also including sign languages.) A single word, or even an ill-timed pause, can cause real and lasting harm.

And this goes for all kinds of relationships; for example, relationships between

• a job candidate and an interviewer,

• a company and their client,

• a parent and their child,

• a manager and their report,

• two coworkers,

• a teacher and their student,

• a content creator and an audience member,

• two friends,

• and many, many more.

Language is the glue that holds our relationships together. Except that language is a lot more complicated than glue. And it has a lot more moving parts.

One complication that doesn’t get talked about enough is the communication clashes and misunderstandings that arise between autistic people and allistic people.

I think that we expect to find culture clashes between people who were raised in different countries, or even different regions of the same country. For example, the “New York normal” I grew up with for conversations is pretty different from what is considered normal in California, where I’ve lived for decades.

I’ve seen how when I’m encoding “regular, nothing special” in New York style, Californians may think that I’m so loud that I’m expressing anger, or that my jumping in while someone is still speaking isn’t a sign of engagement but of self-centered rudeness. Or that my touching someone’s arm or shoulder is a sign of sexual interest rather than just something you do when talking with people. These are all misunderstandings that arise from decoding a different social action than the one that was intended.

But many allistic people don’t expect to find similar communication clashes when they interact with autistic people. (Meanwhile, many autistic people spend their lives trying to interpret and adjust to the allistic norms around them.) How much and what type of information to give, how long to talk for, when it is your turn to talk (and what you should talk about), how to express empathy, if you should interpret a comment literally or not—these are all common locations of communication clashes based on neurotype.

For example, the “appropriate length” for a conversational turn is a common clash point. As I noted earlier, the common autistic trait of monologuing means that an autistic person’s “normal” conversational turn may be much, much longer than a “normal” turn for someone who isn’t autistic. And how literally to interpret a comment or question can cause real challenges for many autistic people; their neurotype means that literal interpretation is the default, while allistic speakers will frequently use hints, implications, and subtext to add meaning that they assume will be easily interpreted by the listener.

• • •

The world is complicated and dynamic and filled with variety. I’m a birder and a hiker, and I love field guides because they help me make sense of the complex world around me. They give me the skills to identify plants and animals out in the wild. They help me understand what’s safe and what’s dangerous. (Although I don’t think I’ll ever feel confident enough to forage for and eat wild mushrooms.) And they show me what various things have in common and how they are related to one another.

That’s why I’ve written this field guide for you. Because language is also complicated and dynamic and filled with variety. Some words are “safe,” and others can be “dangerous.” If you can identify different kinds of language and use simple principles to explain how that language is behaving out in the world, then you are on the path to really understanding human communication—and you’re learning how to avoid accidentally poisoning someone with the verbal equivalent of a toxic mushroom.

EVENT PLANNING

Have you ever gone to an event, like a wedding or cookout or birthday party, and felt really welcomed and comfortable? An event that gave you the feeling, “Wow, they really thought of everything!”

Or, on the flip side, have you ever gone to a wedding or cookout or birthday party and felt uncomfortable and unwelcome? Maybe even forgotten about? Where you thought, “Hmm, they weren’t thinking about me at all when they planned this.”

A good event requires event planning. And a major part of event planning is thinking through the different kinds of people who are going to come to the event and taking their needs and preferences into account.

Let’s say you’re going to host an afternoon cookout and you want to make sure everyone feels comfortable and included. Once you know who’s coming, you might make a list of their various needs and how you will meet those needs.

• “Okay, Michelle is celiac, so I’ll need some gluten-free options. And I’ll have to separate them out so there’s no cross-contamination.”

• “Srini is hard-core vegetarian, so I’ll need vegetarian food like skewers—and we’ll want to cook them on a separate part of the grill from the meat.”

• “Allen will need a chair that will be comfortable for him and support his weight. I’d better make sure I’ve got a few good options.”

• “Khalil doesn’t drink alcohol, so let’s come up with a fun mocktail so he can drink things that aren’t boring.”

• “Rachel goes really easily into sensory overload, so I’ll make sure there’s a quiet room they can retreat to.”

• “Julie always runs cold, so I’ll wash that blanket so it’s ready for her if she needs it.”

You then make sure to communicate the care you’ve taken, especially when it comes to comfort and safety. You let Michelle know she doesn’t have to worry about cross-contamination, you let Srini know that the veggies were cooked separately from the meat, and you let Rachel know they’ve got a safe retreat in case things get to be too much.

The people who attend this cookout are set up to feel good. They can sit comfortably, they can eat safely, they can drink fun drinks, and they can warm up if it’s too chilly for them. They will probably leave feeling warmly about you, their host. (Note that an event host might be an organization and not an individual.) Your care, your consideration, your respect for their various situations and needs—it has come through in your actions.

And the outcome is not just a good cookout. It is a closer and warmer relationship with each of those people who felt taken into consideration, respected, and cared about.

I’ve been to incredibly well-planned and inclusive events and really enjoyed them. But I’ve also encountered people who don’t take this approach to event planning.

They say things like, “It’s my barbecue and I’m not interested in vegetarian options. If you’re vegetarian, maybe my barbecue isn’t the place for you.”

Or they might say, “Gluten-free is just a trend. It’s not real. Nobody’s actually allergic to pasta or pizza. So yeah, I’m having my birthday dinner at the pizzeria.”

Or they might say, “Happy hours are what bring our team together! They’re just how we let off steam. Okay, maybe you’re pregnant or Muslim or think you’re a recovering alcoholic. You can have a ginger ale. Hanging out in cool bars is how our team bonds.”

If you’re vegetarian and invited to a barbecue where there’s pretty much nothing for you to eat? You’re probably not going to leave feeling closer to or respected by your host.

If you’re celiac and invited to a pizzeria birthday dinner where there’s nothing on the menu that’s safe? You’re likely to just not go. And you’ll probably feel like your host doesn’t care about you—not only about your feelings, but also about your health and safety.

If you’re pregnant or an observant Muslim or a recovering alcoholic and your team insists on a weekly alcohol-centered happy hour as bonding time? You’re probably not going to feel bonded with that team. Or maybe even welcome at all.

Careful and thoughtful event planning can lead to warmer and improved relationships. And careless and self-centered event planning often leads to weaker and colder relationships.

• • •

I’d like you to apply this idea of event planning to what I call communication events.

I’ve spent decades analyzing language in context. The handy umbrella term I learned in grad school to describe language in context is speech event. But because this term was coined before we started texting and IMing and emailing and posting on Slack, speech is too narrow. Plus, for many people, the word speech doesn’t invoke sign languages, which makes it feel less inclusive. So, I’ve shifted to communication event.

A communication event is any social activity where language is playing an important role. There are real-time events where people are speaking (and, again, speaking includes sign languages); for example:

• An in-person conversation

• A lecture

• A meeting

• A sermon

• A panel discussion

And there are other forms of communication that involve technology. People may hear, see, read, or feel them after they were produced; for example:

• A text message

• A post on social media

• An email

• A press release

• A video on social media

• A commercial

Those inclusive practices for event planning can get transferred right over to communication event planning. At the heart of both kinds of planning is thinking through two core things:

1. Who do I need to think about?

2. What needs do they have that I should take into account?

Twenty-first-century etiquette simply asks us to take into account people whose needs have often been ignored in the past. It suggests that we should treat those people with as much respect, care, and consideration as the people who have been traditionally centered and catered to.

For some communication events, like press releases and videos and social media posts, you can plan in advance. For example, you might make an inclusion checklist and before you post or send something out, you run through the list and make sure you haven’t forgotten about some type of person. (In the Resources section at the end of the book, you’ll find a template for inclusion checklists that you can use as a starting point.) This process is the most like regular event planning, where you set up the food and the space for all kinds of guests.

But for other communication events, such as work conversations and meetings and interviews, you’ll need to have practiced enough so you can be inclusive on the fly. If you’ve developed new habits, then when you go on autopilot, or are so focused on what you’re trying to say that you lose track of how you are saying it, you’ll choose the inclusive option by default. This is more like always having a thoughtfully stocked fridge and pantry so if people with different kinds of needs show up, you’re ready at a moment’s notice to offer them something appropriate.

A NEW FRAMEWORK

I’ve developed a simple new framework for people who want to harness the power of inclusive language. People who want to make sure that they’re paying attention. People who want to use language to build and improve their relationships and to create and maintain connection.

After I left academia, I started consulting for organizations that want to use more inclusive and appropriate language. For years, my clients have come to me because they feel overwhelmed by all the information out there on inclusive language. It’s often in bits and pieces, it’s sometimes contradictory, it feels scattered, and they can’t figure out how to apply knowledge from one short list of “bad” and “good” words to other areas. The fact that interpretations are so context-dependent can make things feel even more complicated.

So I’ve created an organizing system for you. It’s my Six Principles of Inclusive Language.

Each principle has been reverse-engineered to address problems I’ve seen in my years of consulting and research—research that is based on multiple languages in multiple countries. So even though the examples in this book will be focused on English as spoken and written in the United States, the principles can be applied to any language in any location. If you are Deaf and in the US, you can straightforwardly use my examples for written English but will need to translate into equivalents for sign language. And if you speak English in another country, you might have to do some translation work when it comes to the specific examples I use. But the principles I’m illustrating with those examples will hold true.

In addition, each principle is based on a foundational truth about what creates feelings of connection, safety, and trust in all kinds of relationships, including the relationships between companies and clients.

Finally, each principle is designed to hold steady even as language changes and evolves. Words that are considered acceptable today may become unacceptable in just a few years, but the principles you can use to evaluate these words will stay the same.

Together, these six principles can be used as a powerful checklist to evaluate language:

1. Reflect reality.

2. Show respect.

3. Draw people in.

4. Incorporate other perspectives.

5. Prevent erasure.

6. Recognize pain points.

If you follow these principles, you’ll be speaking and writing inclusive language. And you’ll be able to explain to people in a clear and scientific way what’s wrong with problematic language.

In the next chapter, I’ll lay the groundwork for these principles, including why it’s important to move beyond the dictionary. I’ll also share some key concepts from linguistic anthropology that are central to inclusive language: namely, the “flavor” of words, their semantic framing, and their indexicality.

Then we’ll go through each of the six principles, which I will illustrate using a few specific examples.

In order to reflect reality, it’s important to use appropriate pronouns and accurately refer to gender, which is more than just a binary. I’ll also show you three problematic ways that language is commonly used to distort reality.

To show respect, you’ll learn how to avoid giving unconscious demotions—those snap judgments where you assume someone has a lower-prestige job than they actually do. (Or when someone who is just going about their day is assumed to be dangerous or a criminal.) And you’ll see how important it is to say and spell names correctly, avoid using unwanted nicknames, and address people respectfully without misgendering them.

To draw people in, you’ll learn about pejoration and how negative cultural attitudes can turn neutral words into insults. We’ll go over the best ways to talk about disability, and how to be both inclusive and respectful when interacting with disabled people. I’ll also explain the concept of markedness and show how it underpins the subtle ways that language can suggest that race only involves people who aren’t white.

To incorporate other perspectives, we’ll dig into the importance of thinking through the ways other people’s lived experiences might be different from your own. I’ll lay out some subtle ways that pronouns such as you, we, and everybody can exclude people who haven’t been taken into account. And we’ll take a closer look at softening language and how it can inappropriately shift the focus away from a person who has been harmed by bad behavior.

To prevent erasure, we’ll look at the negative effects of phrases like “you guys” and contrast it with the ways that gender-neutral language includes people instead of erasing them. You’ll also see the importance of avoiding misnaming, using language that reflects that there are multiple skin tones, remembering and including indigenous history, and remembering and including sexual orientations beyond heterosexual.

Finally, in order to recognize pain points, you’ll read about how to give compliments that land well and how to avoid compliments that show inappropriately low expectations. And you’ll see how important it is to learn about and avoid lightly referencing painful experiences that have been glossed over in white or Western history, such as dictatorships, genocide, and chattel slavery.

As I noted in the preface, these principles are the framework of this book, rather than identity groups of different kinds. When I talk about a specific identity in this book, it is as an illustration of a principle in action: here’s an example of problematic language that people in this group deal with, and here’s a more inclusive alternative you can use in its place. This means that I may not spend a lot of time or detail on an identity you’re particularly interested in. However, the principles are designed to apply to every kind of group of people out there.

WHO SHOULD WE PAY ATTENTION TO?

Let’s go back to the ways inclusive language is like event planning. If you’re used to thinking through who is coming to an event and what you need to do to make them comfortable, you can transfer that same process to your communications.

I hear from many people that they feel overwhelmed because they don’t know who they should pay attention to, what kinds of categories are important, or what groups of people they could learn more about so they can make more informed decisions when it comes to language.

Human beings are complicated! We have lots of different ways we think about ourselves and define ourselves. And we are all of those things at once. For example, I’m female (and was assigned female at birth), heterosexual, American, originally a New Yorker and now a Californian, short, the oldest child, a sister, a person who grew up speaking English at home, middle-class, “white” on the US Census, but with hair and skin that are dark enough that many people ask “what are you?” or talk to me in other languages, a grandchild of immigrants, neurotypical(ish), and a whole lot more.

Some of these aspects of my identity come into play way more than others when it comes to inclusive language. For example, being female is a big one. But being an older sister is not. Being heterosexual is a big one. Being short is not.

So I’m going to give you a list of “the big ones.” The dimensions of human identity that most frequently play a role in inclusive language and that you can learn to pay attention to (if you’re not already). For each of these categories, there is a dominant group. (I’m not going to call them the majority, because it often isn’t about numbers. It’s about who has the power or the prestige. I’m also not going to use the word minority for the same reason.) Language is generally oriented toward the dominant group and presents the world from that group’s perspective.

When it comes to inclusive language, the people we want to pay particular attention to are the ones who aren’t members of the dominant group. You might call them underrepresented or marginalized. These are the people who historically haven’t been taken into account by language—who haven’t been appropriately represented, and who haven’t been focused on and centered. That’s why we have to put in some extra effort to take them into consideration and make sure that they are given their fair share of attention and care.

For inclusion, the most important dimensions of human identity on an individual level are:

• Race and ethnicity

• Gender

• Sexual orientation

• Physical ability/disability

• Neurotypicality/neurodiversity

• Age

• Weight

• Height

In a social context, the most important dimensions of human identity are:

• Geographic location

• Language and dialect

• Country of origin, indigenous status, and immigrant status

• Socioeconomic class and income

• Educational background

• Religion

• Marital status

• Parental status

• Political affiliation

• Military experience

And for those of you thinking about communications in a work context, you will want to take into account:

• Work content and field

• Division/department/etc.

• Management status

• Seniority

• Work location

This may look like a long list of ways to slice and dice different aspects of a person’s identity. But the more you get into inclusive language, the more you’ll get a feel for which dimensions matter for a given context. For example, religion may play a role when talking about holidays or planning social events for work, but it will probably be less important when it comes to planning out how to hold more inclusive meetings.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

If you don’t speak French, you wouldn’t read a book about French grammar for a few hours, close it, and think, “Well, I read that book, so I speak French now!” That’s because we all know that it takes time and practice to learn new language skills. It’s true for foreign languages. And it’s true for inclusive language as well.

So, I have designed this book to bring you to a new level of inclusive language skills. To help you move from passive understanding to active fluency, I’ve given you a short set of exercises at the end of each chapter that explains a principle (Chapters 2 through 7).

Here’s how you can use this book for maximum impact. First, you can read it through so you get the big picture and see how it all fits together. Then you can spend a month doing the activities associated with each principle. A month should be long enough to learn new ways of paying attention and develop new habits.

If you focus on the activities for one principle each month, by the end of six months, you’ll have a whole new toolkit for inclusive language. You’ll be able to speak fluently in ways you couldn’t without practice. When you encounter questions about whether or not language is inclusive, you’ll be able to evaluate that language using the six principles as a checklist. And you’ll be able to make well-informed choices that let you harness the power of inclusive language.

By consistently using inclusive language, you can make sure that the people you have relationships with—such as clients, colleagues, students, friends, family members, and romantic partners—feel taken into consideration and valued.