 all of you doing? All right, I think we can get started now because my timer has already started, so we're going now. My name is Thursday Bram. I've been writing about technology for over a decade now. God, I feel old. I've written blog posts, case studies, documentation, ebooks, and so very, very, very many social media posts. I'm the editor of the Responsible Communication Style Guide, which covers how to write about identity in the context of technology. This is my baby. This is what I spent the last year on, and one of our editors is in the audience as well. But we're here to talk about inclusive writing, and I find it really useful to get started from a high-level perspective to talk about what inclusive writing is. This is the talk where you get handouts, possibly even homework. Talking about inclusive writing, I find that it's really useful to start from a shared definition. This is going to be interactive. I know that's scary, but I will try to only call on people who want to be called on. What do all of you think of as inclusive writing? What's your definition? Anybody have one they want to share? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Yeah. Yeah, so inclusive writing is avoiding assumptions about gender and sexuality and details like that. Yeah. Yeah, writing so that you connect with your audience rather than alienating them, which hopefully is the goal in the first place. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So contextualizing information so that it's accessible and easy to understand for people with links to other resources and documentation. Yeah, those are all really good definitions. So my personal definition of inclusive writing is writing that respects the humanity of the people it describes. So that kind of speaks to all of those. Like you want to respect them by not making assumptions. You want to respect them by making sure they can engage and you want to respect them by making sure they have all the information they need. Another characteristic of inclusive writing is that it can include a diversity of perspectives. Any characteristic that accurately describes people is a question of, oh, I haven't been moving my slides, have I? So we're really just looking for characteristics of inclusive writing that make people feel welcome and doesn't inaccurately describe them. Inclusive writing does have moving goalposts, though, considered the Bechdel test, which was first proposed in 1985. The Bechdel test asks if a movie meets three criteria. First, does the movie have at least two women characters? Second, do they talk to each other? And third, is that conversation about something besides a man? And we are talking about an absolute bare minimum here. The Bechdel test doesn't ask for actors of color, queer roles, characters from beyond the gender binary, or even for those women to talk to each other for a set amount of time. Goodfellas passes the Bechdel test because two women talk about shopping for a moment. It is a very low bar, but in 1985, it was a higher bar, hopefully, than it is now. So our goals have to keep moving forward. Inclusive writing, no matter the medium or the intent, continuously evolves. So if the Bechdel test used to be our goal, we need to think about what we can do to move past that, especially outside of screen writing. For instance, being able to bring in more terminology, more information, more context is a good start. So a lot of those questions are questions of style, though. Whether you use a standard approach to any of your writing, you're creating sort of a sense of style for the writing you're doing. And talking about inclusive writing has to be a question of normalcy and style. You can't see the pop quiz yet. Sorry. Let's see. For normalcy, we've got a lot of examples. A normal movie these days includes both picture and sound. Even though a century ago, movies and talkies were distinct types of media. So these standards aren't always written down. There's no law that says that a movie has to have sound, but today going silent is very risky. It's a part of the style that we consider normal for movies. Similarly, there's no rule that says that you have to be a white dude to be on the cover of Wired Magazine, but normally that's exactly who winds up there. That's because magazine covers normally include pictures of people and media that generally focus on groups with people. So it's a privilege unless an editor makes a special effort to change their sense of normal or their sense of style. Style in this context specifically means making a decision. You're deciding what's going to be standard or normal in your particular project. You might style an article by choosing to indent certain blocks of text or choosing to anglicize someone's name in a particular way. So we can make our writing more inclusive by creating new normals with conscious decisions about our language choice. So with style, we get to talk about style guides, which are kind of my favorite thing. The idea of a style guide is a way to remember all of our style decisions. Once you've made a conscious decision with regards to your style, you need a way to stick with it without having to make the same decision over and over and over again. That's like trying to remember the difference between words like affect and effect when you are in the middle of writing something. No writer, no programmer, nobody does this sort of work without some sort of external resource. We at least run spell check and check if that style guide gives us further information. Hopefully if spell check doesn't handle it, we have a few more resources, though. Style guides are tools to make writing easier. They grew out of journalism. My first love was the AP style book, which I learned in college, which a lot of newspapers use. There's plenty of others that range from talking about technical topics to talking about religion to anything else you can think of. But they're basically just reference guides of information you need to work on a specific project. I actually make my own style guides for just about every project I do. I even made a style guide for the style guide that we worked on. It's a bit meta, but it's really helpful. I have a document with all the project-specific information, like each participant's name spelled correctly, sometimes with notes on how to pronounce it because I'm a white girl from the Midwest and sometimes I need some help. I also usually put all the latest technical jargon and all the resources I know someone else will need if suddenly I can't work on this project and I need to hand it off. So style guides grow out of journalism, though. Does that mean they're useful for technical communities? Absolutely. A style guide is a way to both bring together the voice of the project and to avoid making really awful errors you have to correct later. So for programmers, there's a lot of recommendations for how you write code, how many spaces or how many tabs or any of those details. But a style guide is the easiest way to get everybody on the same page. Just like something like PEP 8 in the Python community is effectively a style guide for code, you can have different style guides that focus on technical information rather than writing information. Designers use style guides that avoid colors that somebody with color blindness will struggle with. So you may also wind up with more than one style guide on your desk for a project. In fact, you often should have more than one style guide on your desk because it's a question of graceful deprecation. If you need a project specific style guide, that's great, but you may probably also need an industry specific style guide or even a more general style guide like the Chicago manual style which covers everything. So these are a practical tool for improving inclusivity. Because no matter how good our intentions are, we're all, you know, human. So if we have documentation, if we have tools to help us with inclusivity, it becomes easier. Think about how hard it was to switch from typing one period, one space after a period from two. You'll only make the switch if you understand why it's worth the effort and you'll need some editing help in the meanwhile. Learning to use, say, the singular they if you're not used to it can be about on par with that level of effort. So you all have many style guides now and we've been talking about them, so we're going to actually use them. So for instance, if we were trying to make sure that we're using somebody's pronouns correctly, we could look up in our style guides pronouns. Does somebody want to read the pronoun entry for us? Anybody? And as loudly as you can project, please. The set of pronouns to use when referring to someone such as they, them, she, her, he, him, etc. You should ask someone what pronouns to use for them if you're going to communicate regularly and especially if you're going to write about them. If you're in a situation where you can't ask, for example, for a dictionary, and you don't know for sure what pronouns you should use for them, they, them is always a safe bet. When someone says something along the lines of my pronoun is, you should use those pronouns when they're writing. Yeah, so it can be that simple. You just ask people, but we need reminders to ask sometimes and that's where the style guide comes in. Okay, so you might have seen this a little bit before. I have a journalism degree and I have this professor who gives surprise quizzes on AP style just to check who bothered to bring their style guide to class. And in honor of that dedication to the importance of style guides, I'm going to give you all a pop quiz. Also, you know, audience participation makes it more fun. All right, number, oh, and all the answers are in your style guide. So number one, when referring to the chief technical officer of a corporation, for the second time, how should you abbreviate their title? Heidi, you can't answer this because you helped write the book, sorry. See, yeah, CTO capitalized. All right, number two, the Disney movie Pocahontas is based on a true story about a blank woman born around 1596. B. So why is it B in Nazi? Right, because B is more specific and accurate. And especially when talking about somebody's identity, we want to be as specific as possible because being general makes it so much harder to be accurate. All right, number three, how do you spell the name of the Jewish festival of lights which traditionally falls in December? I heard somebody say that it was a trick question over here. It is, in fact, sadly a trick question. A is a good answer, but because different communities of Jews transliterate the word differently, they will have specific preferences. So for instance, in my family, I spell it A, but my aunt, who is ultra orthodox, spells it B. And it makes for searching Gmail for what she wants for presence much harder. So that's one of those cases where you absolutely have to ask. All right, A slash B could absolutely work, but it kind of depends on your project and what choice makes sense in the moment. Okay, so one of the things that we do in tech we wind up doing a lot around writing and inclusive media is we wind up interviewing people quite a bit. Whether it's for writing a quick bio for their contributions to a project, making sure that when you're talking about them in a presentation, you're getting everything correct, or even as you're writing up whether you want a certain candidate or not for a new job. So with interviewing, it's a really useful way to think about inclusivity. Because we have to ask people what they want. With pronouns, for example, people's pronouns change. So not only do we have to ask them what they want today, but next week we should probably be aware of what they're using next week. So with interviewing, we get a chance to sit down and ask some questions. Even if you're looking for just like a quick summary, there are a couple of strategies that you can use to make inclusive interviewing much easier. The three that I really focus on are preparing for every interview. Given that you're probably not going to be paying somebody for the time they spend responding to any questions, the etiquette of unpaid labor requires that you really should be as prepared as possible, but it also makes the whole process a lot easier. Writing out questions ahead of time lets you make sure that you're using time effectively, but also that you don't miss anything that you need. You also, if you're planning your interview, you can Google some stuff ahead of time so that you don't have to make the whole interview about having your subject walk you through one-on-one aspects of whatever they're working on. That way you can get to the interesting stuff and maybe win a Pulitzer Prize or, I don't know, something because you have interesting content to work with. Second, oh, you want to ask rather than assume? Personally, at the beginning of every interview, I ask key biographical information just to confirm what I might have found online. I usually ask by starting, but I usually start by asking what somebody's name is and exactly how they prefer to spell and pronounce it. Even if I think I know, the same with pronouns, I ask specifically their pronouns, their job title, because job titles can be very different from what you find on their LinkedIn if they haven't updated in a while. All of those little details that it'll be really awkward if you have to correct later. You can just ask straight on, privately, in an interview where you don't have to admit that we are all human and fallible. Third, you want to avoid asking questions that you don't need to ask. So for a lot of projects that you work on, you might not need as much information about your subject's identity. For instance, if you are writing a profile of an astronaut who happens to be a woman, you don't necessarily need to ask how they fit in time for their kids, because you wouldn't ask that question of an astronaut who happens to be a man. So if that facet of their identity is leading you to ask questions that you wouldn't ask of anybody else, it's really good to just check yourself and say, no, this isn't actually probably relevant to a profile of somebody about their work. All right. So we have a little follow-up activity. In your booklet, we have a couple of personas. And we're just going to talk about what details we think are important to include in a bio of any of these people. So we're just going to focus on the first persona, because I'm already at 20 minutes. But tell me what details make sense for a bio, rather than details that don't make sense. So I don't have a copy of it with me. Oh, thank you. So if you're writing about Lunella Lafayette, what do you want to make sure makes it into her profile? Any thoughts? It absolutely does matter where the profile is going to be. So for this purpose, let's say Lunella Lafayette has just joined your company, and you want to introduce her to the rest of the team. What's the first thing your team needs to know about Lunella? That she is the smartest person in the whole world. Yeah, that's probably a good thing to lead with. Are there any details here that don't matter to a profile? Absolutely. Like giving a nickname does absolutely personalize somebody and make them a little bit more accessible. Makes them a little bit more familiar off the bat. Absolutely. Ask her what she would like us to know. Okay, what about her wearing glasses? Does that matter? No. It's medical information. It's not really helpful. Yeah. So, because I can't help myself, we're going to do another little pop quiz. So what is Dr. Princess's job title? Physician? Yes. Correct. What about number two? How do you spell Yuri's last name? Depends on where they're from, right? So this person is Asian, but he has anglicized his name and has been using his family name as his last name. Nice catch. All right. Number three. What are Lunella's pronouns? She, her. And then for a bonus round, where are these three characters from? Because I steal my material whenever I can. Very lazy. Yeah. Lunella is Moon Girl from Marvel. She is the best and she has her own dinosaur. Yuri is from a sports anime called Yuri on Ice. And then Dr. Princess is from Adventure Time. And she is neither a doctor nor a princess but still a physician, which is like the greatest trick question for style guides because a lot of people think that doctor is automatically a title. But there are people named doctor. So let's talk about editing for inclusivity real fast. So depending on how you write, you may ignore details like spelling in order to get some words on the page and go back later to fix them. Because, you know, good spelling doesn't make good writing. It's a good strategy and it's one that I use all the time. But if you are focused on getting things down on paper, you have to have an editorial process to make sure that you're going back over it and getting things right. Like running through spell check and things like that. So this is kind of the short version of my personal checklist. Check against your style guide or style guides. Double check for stereotypes, microaggressions and unconscious biases. And if you're still working on developing kind of an understanding of some of these concepts, Facebook has a free unconscious bias training on their website that is pretty fast to go through in its all videos. I also keep a count of diversity metrics in my work. So this means that I keep general track of who I'm writing about and what their demographics are just to make sure that I'm not just writing about one group of people on a regular basis. And then lastly, confirm names, spellings, dates and other facts. All the stuff a fact checker would do if journalism wasn't, you know, dying and fact checkers couldn't get work. I'm not bitter. All right. And because I like my activities, we have another one. So there's a job listing in your booklet. And I'm not going to tell you what company this job listing came from. I only made like two changes to it. It was this special when I found it. So with this job listing, we want to talk about what we can do to make it more welcoming or friendly. But we can't change company policies, like the number of years of experience required of an applicant. What are some things here that we can change to make this job listing a little bit more welcoming? Get rid of the ninja. Yes. Ninjas are not what you are necessarily looking for in a full-stack programmer. Their martial arts capacities probably don't impact their coding that much. They use the word sexy. I'm sorry. I don't have any sort of romantic attachment to any piece of technology I work with. So that's a weird way to describe it, I think. Anything else? Oh, yes. Remove the death march. So I would like to say in another discussion on this job listing, somebody mentioned that they didn't want to remove it because they wanted to make it clear this company was terrible to work for. Fair warning, I guess. But I think that you can communicate how company is cultured without necessarily resorting to using a term that has a lot of meaning like death march. For instance, like a lot of people who might be of Jewish or Native American heritage will probably respond very poorly to that word. As well as, you know, tons of other communities. So yeah, language choice definitely matters a lot in these sorts of job listings. So, yeah, and those weren't the pieces that I changed. But yeah, if anybody has any guesses of that company, please don't share them in front of a camera or anything I would prefer not to get sued. So getting into the actual writing part of inclusive writing. Communication is a skill and not necessarily something we know how to do. It is something we should think of as a long-term learning process. We have to keep learning new pieces of the communication puzzle and putting them together in new ways. Personally, I learn a lot through reading as widely as I can, but that's not necessarily enough. Sometimes you have to talk to actual humans. Otherwise, there are lots of details you won't pick up. Personally, I still maintain that HomeDepot is the place where tools come from because I learned the word depot when I was five, and I learned it from a book, not from a human. I know it's depot now, but it doesn't look like it. But we have to try out new words to add them to our vocabulary, right? We need to practice using them to really learn them. And inclusivity skills are exactly the same. And while I know that classes and homework are exciting even when you are in school, being able to improve our work always has value. Some of the terms that we are talking about, or some of the uses of terms that we're talking about, didn't exist a decade ago. Approaching all of this with the understanding that we have to continue learning is important. Most style guides come out every year for a reason. And practice is the only way to improve your writing, whether you're working on inclusion, spelling, or any other writing skill. You don't have to write the great American novel, but you do need to look for opportunities to practice. If your company says, hey, do you want to write a blog post for the blog? That could be a great opportunity to practice, and that's a great way to help improve your writing skills. And that's a great way to improve your editorial support. If your company doesn't give you that sort of support, hit me up later on Twitter, I have some resources. So we don't have enough time to do an actual inclusivity writing activity, which is what I really like to do. But one thing that I would really recommend as a way to practice as well is to write a little bio about them. They may even want to use that bio later because writing your own bio tends to suck. So this is of course a fairly fast talk. We only have 40 minutes to go through giant piles of information. So after this talk, I am hoping that you go ahead and you practice and you continue to learn. But my real ideal outcome is that you all go back to your communities and your companies and start making your own style guides for funsies. That's the dream. And I know it's only my dream. Not everybody finds style guides as fun. But even if you aren't sold on the fun of compiling lists of correctly spelled and formatted words, which is fine to each their own, I do encourage you to keep practicing as much as possible. Consider talking to your team about committing to a shared style guide, even if it's one that you're not creating internally, just to make editing easier. Your co-workers might find this piece of information particularly persuasive. They no longer have to argue about what gets capitalized in the company name. If you do camel case or something like that, you can have it written down and nobody gets to dispute it anymore. Style guides or editorial workflows also speed up projects. They reduce errors. They reduce stress, especially when you're trying to get documentation or marketing content written on deadline. And your team's sustainability will go up too. Even without a dedicated editor or a dedicated technical writer, your team will be better equipped to put together written materials that actually look like they all came from the same team instead of sort of haphazard whatever people want to do. You can also then make it possible for everyone on your team to take a turn at editing material and share the workload a little bit, just like every programmer on the team should be able to do a code review at any time. And also when you've got a standard approach, you can build tools that make that standard approach even easier. One of our goals with the style guide is we're going to build a linter that just tells us what to do because it's a resource that'll make writing easier. You can automate some parts of the editing process, though, of course, you do still have to have a human involved somewhere. You can tweak and hack and customize a style guide or an editorial process to your heart's content. And I know, like hanging out with programmers, being able to tweak the process is like half the fun. So you want to customize your arguments for your team if you want to bring this sort of resource in, just like you customize your style guide by adding the correct spelling of your organization's name. See what I did there. That was really clever. So just to give you two style guides, the first one is the one that I work on, so yeah, I'm a little bit biased, but the AP style book is a generally useful resource. And then does anybody have any questions? So the question is, how do you approach someone who uses terms that we would discourage? So something that would be less inclusive, something like the sexy and the ... So there's a couple of different approaches that I take depending on who the person is. So if they are above me in some sort of hierarchy, it's a lot different than if they are my peer. So with peers, it can be as simple as, hey, this isn't going to be effective, let's just change it up, and you don't have to get into a whole argument about this with them, and that's actually where a style guide comes in handy. I've had so many people who say, well, do it however you want, if you just tell me how. I hand them the style guide and I say do it how the book says. With somebody who's a little bit higher up, it's a little bit harder. You have to come in a little bit with a softer touch usually. But with a lot of inclusivity, there's numbers and figures that we can use to support our work. For instance, Forrester is a company that does these huge massive studies, and they found that companies that hire inclusively raise their bottom line by 20%. Their revenues increase by 20%. So if you have a job listing you're trying to edit for more inclusivity, you can go to your boss and you can say that doing this right can bring up our revenues by that much. It's a harder sell and open source because revenues aren't necessarily what you're looking at, but if you're in a community with a code of conduct, you can refer to that. Those sorts of pieces can be really useful. And if you have a specific situation in mind, I'm happy to talk later. So the question is if somebody comes back to one of these edits or one of these suggestions with that they didn't intend to communicate in a specific way. This is where I usually start talking about the evolution of communication if it is somebody I like, if it is somebody I don't like, I sometimes just say, well you didn't get the meaning across, so let's change it so we get your actual meaning. With somebody I do like, we can talk about how language and communication changes. How if we use words the same way we did in the Victorian era, well first of all, nobody would know that language. Second of all, we would be communicating about very different things in very different ways. So technical training is part of inclusivity too. Training is available for a lot of these things. I do training myself. There are people who come in and do training on the writing aspects, on the inclusivity aspects. There are resources in this area. So the questions especially around using they, them as a singular pronoun, how do you avoid alienating people who've learned it as only to be used in plural in school? So this is kind of a difficult point for me. If somebody prefers they, them pronouns it's not really a preference. It's a question of identity and I'm always going to default to making sure that people feel like I am being about them accurately. Whether or not the audience is going to be completely comfortable with that. That said, there's a lot you can do in terms of educating people on one basis. It's usually not the place of a publication or an article to include an entire explanation of things like pronouns. But you can just talk to people about like the idea is you're just describing people better and more accurately and in a way that they want to be described. It goes across more than just pronouns. So for instance I grew up in the US Jewish and there's a lot of terms that can be used to describe somebody who are Jewish. Some of them are kind some of them are not kind but when somebody asks me how I want to be identified I'm going to be very clear and I'm going to get them to stick to it because I do find some of those other terms hurtful and I find that explaining it in that way to somebody who doesn't necessarily understand pronouns is sometimes useful. But there are people who are very resistant to the idea of being inclusive and for those people you may not have an argument that will persuade them. In those cases it's more a matter of doing the right thing by the people you are communicating about and communicating with than making everybody feel perfectly comfortable. Alright. I have no time left. So have a celebratory gift and come find me later if you have questions.