Inclusive Language All Round

Language is a funny thing – it can open doors – or it can just as easily close them.  It can soothe, or incense.  It can calm, or it can cause people to jump up and act on your every nuance.

For your message to succeed, your language has to be inclusive.  Not only that, but it has to have a degree of portability – for example, if you’re trying to get people to come to your ’cause’, you need to have a way to summarize and explain what your cause *is*.  If you are trying to sell something – your USP needs to be easily expressible – if you’re simply trying to teach, your ‘unit of sense’ needs to be the most powerful thing those studying under you will encounter.

The ‘unit of sense’

In poetry, the unit of sense is one line – it should make sense on it’s own, but stand as a broader part of the tapestry of a whole piece – in some ways each unit of sense, each line, should stand as a whole, but have the deeper meaning.  It should be a perfect picture on it’s own – which, when placed with other pictures creates more perfect pictures.

When teaching, the unit of sense is much the same – it’s the overall message of that lecture, as taken as a broader whole in the syllabus.  It’s the essence of what you’re trying to teach that day – towards the whole exam.  Units of sense can be as large, or as small as necessary, but they should be portable.  In other words, people should be able to ‘take them away’.

How does that apply to writing?

If you think about it, the ‘unit of sense’ theory extends to everything we do – each post in our blog should be a unit of sense, each paragraph.  Down to each sentence, we should make sure that everything we say is both clear, and can stand as part of the message of the piece itself.  In blogging this is especially important – most people read webpages, ready to move on – unless you have a devoted readership, you will find that your units of sense need to be especially powerful.  And one of the cornerstones of that is inclusive language.

In our next article, we’ll look at the ‘niche inclusion’ theory, and how you can relate that to your own work.  Until then though, do you have any questions, comments or thoughts on inclusive language?