When you finished your last class in your last year of school, you probably expected to leave homework behind forever. A person who becomes a professional writer may be the exact kind of nerd to miss school and homework in adulthood (it’s OK, this blog is pro-nerd). But the people you’re writing for likely don’t feel that way—plenty of people were thrilled to leave that particular aspect of life behind.

When they read content today—whether for work, education, or entertainment—they don’t want flashbacks to high school. They want the content they read to provide the information they seek without making them work too hard for it. Part of the job of a good content marketing writer is to help people learn in ways that feel effortless, or at least easy. Bonus points if you can make a piece on a dry or technical subject entertaining. 

Doing that is hard and requires skill, but there are a few relatively easy techniques you can employ to make your content more readable.

What is Readability?

Readability is the term used to describe how easy a piece of writing is to read. A text that’s “readable” is one that the typical reader doesn’t have to exert all that much effort to understand. If someone has to look up words, or take time to sit and think about a sentence before it makes sense to them, then it’s not very readable. People sometimes talk about readability in terms of grade level (e.g. “7th-grade reading level” to describe something the typical 7th grader could easily understand).

Why Readability Matters*

Before we get into how to write content that’s readable, let’s take a minute to consider the why. Your audience is smart, right? Do you really need to make reading your content easier on them?

Well, yes. Readability isn’t about the intelligence of your audience, it’s about creating an experience that’s genuinely helpful to your readers. And for writers, striving to create readable content offers some key benefits. 

If readers consider your content a slog to get through, they can just click away. 

Chances are, the content you write isn’t being assigned to your readers. No one’s going to get a grade on reading comprehension for that blog post or ebook you wrote. They have to actively choose to click on it, then continue to choose to read it to the end. If the experience of reading your writing is too much work, a lot of readers simply won’t bother. 

And why would they? People have a lot of content options and long to-do lists. It’s common for people to be interested enough in a topic to consider checking it out, but decide they’re not actually interested enough to read the whole thing. Analysis from Chartbeat a few years back found that 33% of people spend less than 15 seconds reading the articles they open. For native advertising, only 24% scroll down the page—which suggests that anyone making marketing content will have a harder job keeping reader attention than those writing unbranded content. 

Making sure your content is easy to read is an important component in getting readers to stick around long enough to see your ideas through to the end. 

Readable content is easier to understand, thus more valuable. 

You’re writing for your audience, not your own ego. Sounding smart won’t earn you any points, but creating content that your readers find genuinely valuable will (OK, maybe not literally—I don’t know of anyone awarding content marketers “points,” but you get the idea). For your content to be successful on the most basic level, it has to provide value to the people you’re writing for.

If someone in your target audience struggles to understand what you’re saying, then your writing isn’t doing its main job. You may assume your audience has a similar base level of knowledge on the topic to you, but that’s not always true. And that assumption can lead you to create content readers find confusing.

7 Ways to Improve Content Readability 

Writing content that’s easy to read takes skill. Each one of these tips can make a big difference in how readable your content is.

1. Keep it casual.

There’s absolutely a place for writing that takes some real mental work to read. If I decide to pick up a novel by Virginia Woolf or a book of academic essays analyzing a topic I’m interested in, I know my brain had better be ready for some work. And I like doing that kind of mental work—in the right context.

But when I want to learn something useful to my job or my life, I’m not in that same headspace. I don’t want to ponder complex themes, I want to learn the information I’m looking for in a straightforward way. Most content marketing belongs in this category. The writing doesn’t need to be showy or formal. Your readers will be better served by a tone that’s conversational and straightforward.

And depending on the brand and audience you’re writing for, injecting some personality into your writing can pay off. Adding a relevant pop culture reference (but nothing too obscure—it should be something you’re confident readers will recognize), a (tasteful) joke, or emojis and gifs can make the content more relatable. 

2. Write out all acronyms the first time you use them.

Most of the people who find their way to my blog likely work in online marketing, or have jobs related to marketing. That means a notable majority already do a lot of thinking, talking, and reading about SEO (search engine optimization). Yet every time I mention it in a post for the first time, I write out what the acronym means. 

Even if 99% of my readers know what an acronym means, that 1% matters too. And I’ve been in that 1% myself when researching new industries for clients. I can tell you from experience that those acronyms that get tossed around in your industry every day are not familiar to everyone who comes across your content. Even worse, a lot of acronyms get reused in different ways depending on the context, so Google doesn’t always turn up the meaning you’re looking for. 

As one example, SME could mean:

• Small and medium-sized enterprise (probably the most common usage)
• Subject-matter expert (the most common way it comes up in my work)
• Society of Manufacturing Engineers (top result in Google)
• Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (2nd result in Google)
• One of the other 89 results listed in the Free Dictionary

A savvy reader would probably be able to figure out which of those results you mean based on the context, but it could take them some real work to get there. Good writing doesn’t make readers work that hard to understand what it’s saying.

Oh, and then there’s always the issue of acronyms that evolve to have popular meanings you may not want to be associated with. 

You can skip the confusion (and risk of accidental sexual meanings) by writing out the meaning of every acronym you use the first time you mention it in each piece.  

3. Explain industry-specific concepts.

As with acronyms, the more familiar you get with the concepts commonly discussed in a particular industry, the easier it is to forget that not all your readers share your familiarity. Having a simple explainer section or paragraph in your piece that defines the meaning of industry-specific terms and concepts can go a long way to ensuring all your readers are able to follow what you’re saying.

Even if you think the concept is pretty obvious and almost all of your readers already know all about it—remember that if 1% is confused, that’s too many confused readers. If you’re worried that explaining a concept will bog down a piece and distract from the main points you’re making, you can link to another piece that does the explaining for you. The important part is to make it easy for readers to figure out what a term means so the rest of the content makes sense to them.

As a bonus, sometimes those explainer sections can be good for SEO. It could help you snag a SERP feature like an answer box or one of the People Also Ask answers.

4. As much as possible, replace long words with simpler words.

Most people who become professional writers have a big vocabulary. When you use words all day long, you get to know a lot of them. But in content marketing, showing off your extensive (voluminous, copious, profuse, etc.) vocabulary usually doesn’t do your readers any favors. There’s a reason I just went with “big” in that first sentence (before showing off my ability to use a thesaurus in the next.)

Simpler words ensure more of your audience can understand what you’re saying without having to think too hard about what individual words mean or pull up dictionary.com. There are times when a longer word is the best choice—either because it adds nuance a simpler word doesn’t contain, or keeps you from using the same word over and over again in a text. But usually, keeping it simple improves readability and makes for better writing. 

5. Make use of subheadings and lists.

Imagine encountering an article where all of the writing was in one big text block. Even before you start reading, it feels more overwhelming and dense than something that has more white space and clearly marked sections. You don’t want your reader to be overwhelmed before they even start. 

When information is divided into chunks, reading it feels more manageable to the average reader. Sections that are thoughtfully divided and labeled make a piece easier to follow. If a reader’s in a hurry or looking for a specific piece of information, they can skim to more easily find what they need. If they’re reading the whole piece, it gives them space to take a break between sections and know what to expect as they move onto each new one. 

And as a nice bonus, they help us as writers apply more thoughtful organization to our pieces, which can make the writing process easier.

6. Use long sentences sparingly.

Now and then a long sentence is the best way to say something. But a lot of the time, it makes it harder for the reader to process what they’re reading. If they can’t remember how a sentence started by the time they get to the end, parsing its meaning requires more complex thinking and could mean having to go back to re-read it a couple of times. 

Anytime you realize a sentence has gotten a bit unwieldy, look for a way to break it into two or more sentences. One trick that makes this easier is to throw out an old rule from your grammar school lessons and get comfortable starting sentences with “and” and “but.” For people writing academic papers, the rules may be different. But for those of us writing for the web, if starting a sentence with “and” improves readability (and it often does), that’s more important than any old grammar rule. 

7.  Proofread out loud.

When you’re the one writing something, obviously your sentences will make perfect sense to you. They came from your head! But sometimes sentences and phrases that sound perfectly fine in the writer’s own head don’t work as well when someone else tries to read them.

The best way to get out of your own head to see how your sentences sound to others is to read your writing out loud. My personal rule is to proofread everything I write at least twice, once out loud. I also recommend waiting until the day after you wrote it to do the proofreading, so you can get a little distance from the writing process.

Everyone—I mean it, everyone—makes mistakes in their first draft. Sometimes it’s basic typos or something embarrassing like the wrong there/their/they’re, and sometimes it’s sentences that are awkwardly worded in a way you won’t catch until you get out of your own head. When you get into the practice of proofreading everything twice, you’ll realize just how many of those errors you make by how many you manage to catch before the piece goes out. 

Conclusion

Most of us in content marketing aren’t writing about topics our audience will find exciting, but that doesn’t mean reading your content has to feel tedious. By making your content more readable, you can ensure your audience gets the information they need without it feeling too much like homework. 

*In my rough outline of this piece, I included a subsection here on how readability is good for SEO—right up until I went searching for data to support that point and learned that, whoops, content readability appears not to impact SEO. 

I’m including this anecdote here as a good reminder to always go looking for evidence to support your assumptions, so you don’t embarrass yourself by making claims that have been disproven.

English (like all languages) changes a lot based on context. The language you use when texting a friend is different than how you’d write in a job application cover letter.  For writers, understanding how to shift the way you write based on context is part of the job. Anyone creating content for the web therefore ought to have a decent understanding of internet language.

Understanding how internet language works doesn’t mean every form of it is appropriate for every context. You probably don’t want to use the language of LOLcats for your business blog (“I can has…SaaS product?” doesn’t really work, does it?).  But understanding the norms of internet language, how people are using them, and which linguistic trends your audience recognizes is valuable.

The linguist Gretchen McCulloch has analyzed the crap out of trends in internet language and shared her insights in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. 

Here are a few useful takeaways for professional content writers. 

Conveying Tone Over the Internet

Have you ever sent an email message that sounded calm and polite in your head, but realized belatedly that it read as angry to the person on the other end? Tone is tricky in online writing, and it’s made trickier by the fact that people of different generations and online habits have different norms around internet grammar.

The Passive Aggressive Period

Take, for instance, the passive-aggressive period. For younger generations, the way you use a period over texts or in chat apps can convey that you’re upset about something. Take a look at this interaction:

Depending on your online habits, the respondent here is either simply agreeing to reschedule, or sending a not-so-subtle signal that they’ll do it, but they’re not happy about it. 

The passive-aggressive period is one form of typographical tone of voice, and a good example of one that can get you in trouble if you’re communicating with someone who has different norms than yours. 

For copywriters, this use of the period won’t apply to most forms of writing you’re likely to do. But as brands start to use chatbots and messaging apps more often, anyone writing copy for them will need to be thinking about the norms of how people talk in that context. 

All Caps Shouting

Even if you’ve never encountered the passive-aggressive period before today, you’ve definitely come across other forms of typographical tone of voice. For example, WHAT KIND OF PERSON EVEN ARE YOU IF DON’T READ THIS AS SHOUTING!?!

Sorry for getting loud there, just trying to make a point. Writing in all caps is widely understood as a way to emphasize what you’re saying, at least if you’re conveying anger or happiness. (McCulloch notes that It doesn’t work the same way for sad messages, for some reason). 

For content writers, you have to be careful deploying this one—you don’t want to seem to be screaming at your readers, unless there’s a damn good reason for it. But knowing it’s there as an option may come in handy at certain moments, assuming your clients are OK with a more casual or playful tone of voice. 

It should also be noted, context matters for this one too. If your blog post headings are typically all in caps, readers won’t assume they should be read as shouting. Having different formatting alongside the all caps text will signal to them that it’s more of a design choice than a tonal one. 

Repeating Letters

Sometimes when dealing with a task that feels tedious and annoying, I’ll message a friend something like “I doooon’t waaaaannnaa do it.” What kind of tone do you read those words in? Probably a tone that sounds a lot like this gif looks. 

Repeating letters works as a way to communicate emphasis on certain words. Apparently this use of repeating letters isn’t new with the internet, McCulloch points out that it’s been growing in popularity for over a century, mostly showing up in dialogue in plays and novels before becoming more common in everyday written speech with the internet.

Linguistic research has found that this form of emphasis is more common in private exchanges between people than in public posts, like on social media. So this is a technique you might want to be a little more careful using in your marketing writing, but there may be some contexts where you want to add emphasis without SHOUTING, and repeating letters can help you do that.   

Emoji, Gifs, and Memes

You’ve probably been using creative grammar to provide emotional cues to your online writing without thinking about it. But an easier and more obvious way to convey emotion over the internet is to add some images in with the text. 

Which brings us to emoji. Whether emoji have a place in your marketing or not depends on your audience and the overall tone you take with your marketing materials. But your audience is almost certainly using them and will know how to recognize and understand common emoji. That makes them a useful option for conveying emotion and tone.

If you write something you mean to be a joke, but that might offend or confuse your audience if they don’t read it as such, an emoji can make sure they understand your intent. If you write something that could come off as confrontational or rude if read in the wrong tone, you can soften it with an emoji. And sometimes emoji can simply help punctuate a point. If you’re describing a cringe moment you want your audience to relate to, the emoji represents the emotion you’re describing pretty darn effectively. 

You’ll likely want to employ emoji more in some marketing contexts than others. They’re a natural fit for the conversational tone of marketing emails and social media, but may seem a little out of place if you try to cram them into more formal business communications like a resume or press release. 

Just remember that they can be a valuable communication tool—but only if you know what you’re doing. You don’t want to accidentally slip an eggplant emoji into marketing content where you’re talking about vegetables because, well, that’s not its main use. When in doubt, check Emojipedia to learn about any slang meanings you may want to avoid. 

If a static emoji can convey emotion, then a gif that includes a more interactive visual can go even further. But whether to use gifs or reference popular memes in your marketing is a trickier question than emoji. They’re more casual and playful than even emoji are, which will make perfect sense for some brands, but feel really out of place with the overall tone of others. 

Gifs often portray actual people, which opens up some additional complications. If you use a seemingly fun gif in an article that features a person who later turns out to be problematic, then future readers of your writing could find themselves faced with the image of an abuser at a point where you’re wanting to convey something fun and light.

Popular memes can be even more fraught for brands to reference. On the one hand, they can be a way to signal to your audience that you understand their references. On the other, if you don’t use them right, they can be a way to show you’re embarrassingly out of touch. Kind of like…well, you know the meme. 

That doesn’t mean you should steer clear completely, just that it’s another area where it matters whether you understand the references and memes yourself, or are trying to shoehorn them in for the sake of seeming relatable. Authenticity may be an overused buzzword in a lot of marketing circles, but it matters. It can be the difference between whether meme use in your marketing comes off as clever or cringe. 

Understanding the Different Internet Cohorts

The foundation for all good marketing is understanding who you’re talking to. The way you write for the internet—and which trends in internet language to use or not—should always depend on who your audience is and what kind of communication they understand and prefer.

McCulloch breaks down internet users into a few main categories that impact how they communicate online and what kinds of internet language they understand. 

• Old Internet People

This is the “founding population” of internet language, the people who remember what McCulloch calls the “old internet.” To be clear, these aren’t necessarily people who are old in years, but those who started using the internet before it became more mainstream. They interacted with people online using tools like Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, and listservs.

These people were using the web when doing so required technological skill, so they’re adept at things like keyboard shortcuts, programming languages, and maybe even computer hardware assembly. Old internet people helped coin some of the internet language that’s now ubiquitous, like “lol” and early use of emoticons  before emoji were the easier option.

• Full Internet People

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the internet went mainstream. The people who came online during this period (which was a lot of us), tend to fall into one of two categories. The first, full internet people, embraced using the internet socially. They (we) chatted with friends using AOL instant messenger, and had early LiveJournal blogs and MySpace profiles before social media was the dominant cultural force it’s become. 

For full internet people, interacting with friends and colleagues online felt (and feels) natural. And internet communication has always included some well known slang (lol, wtf, emoticons, and all caps shouting were already common). This cohort is very comfortable with basic technology, but never had to learn specialized tech skills beyond maybe some basic HTML. 

• Semi Internet People

Semi internet people (hi, mom) started using the internet at the same time as full internet people, but they mostly did so for work. They didn’t embrace it as a social tool to the same degree full internet people did. Because of how ubiquitous social media now is, semi internet people are likely to have Facebook accounts now, but came to social media later and aren’t as likely to use the newer, trendier social media platforms of the moment. 

They probably have specific technical skills they developed for work, like proficiency with Microsoft Office, but haven’t really dabbled much beyond that. And their typical internet communication is more straightforward than that of other categories. They’ll use and recognize emoji, but are less likely to reference memes or use common internet slang. 

• Pre Internet People

Pre internet people are old enough to have been around when full and semi internet people were going online, but they were slow adopters themselves. They put off going online for as long as they thought they could get away with it, but eventually it became a necessity. A lot of pre internet people are older (over 65), but not all. 

By now, they have an email account and may have one social media or video chat account a loved one urged them to set up. But using the internet probably never became second nature to them to the way it has to all these other groups. If these people are in your target audience, they may be hard to reach online. This group is less likely to use and understand internet slang—they write online in much the same way that they would write a postcard to a friend. You’re best off avoiding it completely for any marketing targeting pre internet people. 

• Post Internet People

Post internet people grew up on the internet. They don’t remember the first time they used a computer, and being social online has always felt like a part of life for them. Post internet people are more likely to be active on platforms their parents aren’t on (what teen wants to interact with friends on Facebook where all your parents, aunts, and uncles can see?). 

And they’re pushing the evolution of internet language in ways that won’t be fully understood for a few years. One shift we can recognize now is the evolution of “lol.” The way they use “lol” is no longer about expressing laughter, but more about conveying something about the phrase it’s attached to. It’s used as a way to suggest a second layer of meaning to what you’re saying, which varies depending on context—it could express flirting, a request or offer for empathy, or a softening of expression. If a friend writes you “this project is killing me, lol” they’re not actually suggesting there’s anything funny about the situation. They’re softening the harsh language they used in their complaint, and asking for empathy. 

Fun Facts and Tidbits:

• Patterns in language
  
  Linguists are able to find surprising patterns in the way people communicate. Even something like keysmash (something people use to communicate that they’re having feelings so intense they can’t make words—you may have seen it looking like “asdfkfjas;dsfl”) follows recognizable patterns to set it apart from, say, a cat walking across a keyboard. McCulloch points out that intentional keysmash usually starts with a, often “asdf,” and is typically followed by the same characters in various orders (g, h, j, k, l, and ;). In other words, characters from the middle row of the keyboard. In an informal survey of keysmashers, she confirmed that most people will delete and replace their keysmash if it doesn’t look quite right.
  
  
• The way technology “normalizes” some language (at the expense of others)
  
  Linguists have also found that autocorrect and spellcheck have a discernible impact on the way people write. That’s not entirely a good thing—tools that normalize certain uses of grammar and spelling by presenting them as “right” in comparison to others can slow down the natural evolution of language. And the versions of usage they normalize show bias.
  
  As one example, think about which names spellcheck and autocorrect are most likely to change on a computer or phone in the U.S. Names that come from an English background that tend to be more common amongst white people are more likely to be deemed “correct” by these tools, while names that originated in other parts of the world are more likely to get the little red squiggle or be changed to something else. For writers (and everyone else), it’s worth paying attention to which of these automatic changes and suggestions we accept, instead of going along with all of them.
  
  
• Text etiquette
  
  People of different generations have developed different norms around texting. Younger people consider it rude to pick up a phone call when hanging out around other people, or for other people to expect them to pick up the phone for an unplanned chat (it interrupts whatever they were doing). Older generations see no issue with taking a call while around other people, they assume it’s important and whoever they’re with will understand. But if someone they’re spending time with starts texting? That looks rude to them. Texting doesn’t seem as important, and shouldn’t they put it off until after you part ways?
  
  This difference in texting etiquette may not apply directly to copywriting, but it’s a good example of how easy it is to offend or upset someone by not understanding how their expectations differ from yours. It pays to be aware of how your audience thinks, so you don’t accidentally violate their idea of etiquette.

Conclusion

Sometimes people who write professionally may feel tempted to push for a specific idea of what writing counts as right or wrong—just think about the regular battles on social around the Oxford comma. But for marketers (and all writers, really), what matters most is making sure your audience can understand what you’re saying. That means a clever reference your audience doesn’t get is wasted, but one they do understand can make them feel more connected to your brand. 

It also means that which types of internet language you use should depend entirely on the internet norms of your particular audience. If you’re writing for semi internet people or pre internet people, you should probably ditch the trendy memes and stick with communicating in a more straightforward way. But knowing the way your audience talks online so you can match your language to what they’re used to can be a good way to humanize your brand and write content they connect with.

Anyone that writes for a living doesn’t need to be told that language is important. Figuring out the right words to wield in the right order to effectively convey information is the job, after all. But even skilled writers can be prone to overlook ways that language can be harmful. Many of us use words and phrases all the time that have long been treated as a normal part of the English language, but that actually have a more sinister background or meaning.

As a writer, you don’t want your audience to feel alienated because you unintentionally used language that treats them as an other or outsider. And using language that excludes people is extremely easy. You’ve almost certainly done it before—I know I have. 

Those slip ups have a cost. First and foremost, they make your reader feel bad. Whether they’re hurt, or angry, or just slightly annoyed, you don’t want to inspire those kinds of negative emotions in your audience. But making your writing more inclusive is also good for your brand. Google research found that 64% of people will take action after seeing an ad they consider to be diverse or inclusive, and the numbers are higher for someone marginalized—69% for Black consumers, and 71% for LGBTQ people. 

1. Avoid ableist language.

Ableist language takes a couple different forms. Anytime a term used to describe a physical disability or mental health issue is used as a metaphor or expression, that’s one form of ableism. Examples include calling someone whose behavior you don’t like “crazy,” describing someone who refuses to listen to information “deaf” to it, or describing someone who’s particular about a habit “OCD.”  Another form it can take is using language to describe a disability that the disabled community considers insulting. That includes describing someone who has an unconventional physical appearance as being “deformed” or referring to someone with a learning or intellectual disability as “special needs.” 

Ableist language is all around us. Because it’s so commonplace, it takes effort to learn how to recognize and unlearn it. But getting it right matters. When you use a term that describes an actual disability as a metaphor, it can make disabled readers feel like you don’t actually understand them or their experiences. And when the community that a term describes distances themselves from it, they do so for a reason and it’s our job to listen.

Like all language, ableist language has a tendency to evolve. Sometimes terms that start out as descriptive get weaponized by people that aren’t a part of the community they describe and end up becoming slurs. And sometimes those same words later get reclaimed by people within the community. It’s important to keep paying attention to the voices of the disabled on this topic over time, so you know when there’s been a change in the norms of what language is acceptable. 

Learn more:

• A very useful list of ableist terms to avoid and alternatives to consider in their place from Lydia X. Z. Brown. 
• The Disability Style Guide from The National Center on Disability and Journalism

2. Beware the gender binary.

Unless maybe you’re Gen Z (and probably even then), you were likely raised to understand gender in oversimplistic, binary terms. Mainstream culture has long tried to slot all people into either the category of “man” or “woman,” based on what a doctor said they were at birth. But society has always been wrong about that, and a growing portion of the population is pushing back against rigid definitions of gender. 

Any article that talks about “women” and “men” as though those categories include everyone is leaving out nonbinary people entirely. And anytime a writer describes the biological attributes of sex (such as ability to give birth or having certain body parts) as though they’re exlusive to one gender, they’re excluding trans and intersex people for whom those descriptions don’t apply. That can be hurtful (and infuriating) to people in your audience that are left out, and makes your writing less accurate as well. 

Make sure anytime you’re writing about gender, you consider and include people who don’t neatly fit into the gender binary. If you’re quoting research that only acknowledges cis men and women (as a lot of research in, for example, the health field still does), make note of that rather than treating it as normal or accepted to exclude everyone else. Avoid using gendered pronouns in your writing, unless you’re referring to a specific person (whose pronouns you know). The singular “they” is better for readability than the awkward “he or she” your teachers may have taught you all those years ago anyways.

And speaking of pronouns, if you interview a source for a piece, always ask for their pronouns. You don’t want to get them wrong in your piece. That not only makes you look sloppy, but is also offensive to the person who shared their time and expertise with you.

Learn more:

• The Conscious Style Guide has a guide to Gender, Sex + Sexuality that collects a lot of useful sources and articles. 
• I wrote about how to make marketing gender inclusive for Velocitize. 

3. Don’t let anti-fat bias creep into your writing.

How often have you been in a room with people discussing diets, calories, and weight goals? Probably a lot. It’s (sadly) a common part of life. But the way our culture often talks about weight is damaging. Not only is much of it wrong (weight isn’t correlated to health in the way you might think), but it’s actively harmful. 

The anti-fat bias in our culture causes a huge number of serious problems—from eating disorders, to fat people being bullied and discriminated against, to doctors ignoring real health concerns because they (wrongly) assume all health problems a fat person has can be solved by losing weight. But even if you personally know better than to be a bully to someone because of their weight (and I hope you do, cause if not—WTF), you may be contributing to anti-fat bias in your writing without thinking about it. 

Articles and blog posts that have nothing to do with weight often make casual mentions of diets or “shedding pounds” before summer, as though everyone reading will be on board with those things as a definite good. But for anyone in your audience that’s struggled with an eating disorder or spent years facing discrimination because of their size, a reference to “beach bodies” that you mean to be relatable will read more as an insult.  

Don’t assume weight loss is a goal for all your readers. Make sure you don’t slip into talking about some body sizes as being better than others. And avoid talk of diets or counting calories unless it somehow relates directly to the topic you’re writing about (say, if you’re writing about tips for adopting a vegetarian diet). 

Learn more:

• Aubrey Gorden, who writes as Your Fat Friend, has a lot of great articles on this topic, along with a whole book on the subject that’s well worth the time,
• She also co-hosts an informative (and funny) podcast with Michael Hobbes: Maintenance Phase. 

4. Use person-first language, when appropriate.

Person-first language means emphasizing the person before the descriptor. So instead of referring to someone as a “female writer,” you’d describe them as a “writer that’s a woman.” But in many cases, you don’t even need the descriptor. 

So first off, consider if that description of a person’s race, gender, disability, or other type of marginalization is relevant to what you’re writing. Only mention it if you determine it’s important in the context. And if you decide that mentioning it matters, then you may want to use people-first language—but go ahead and check with the person first, if you’re able. If it’s a source you’re writing an article about, ask them how they prefer to be described. If you’re writing about someone you don’t have that kind of access to, see if you can find examples of how they refer to themselves. If that doesn’t yield results, then person-first language is probably a smart bet. 

Learn more:

• Radical Copyeditor on person-centered language.
• The Association of Health Care Journalists on person-first vs identity-first language.

5.  Consider the history of phrases before you use them.

Sometimes a phrase becomes so common in usage that we say (or write) it without thinking about what the words themselves actually mean. But in a number of cases, those words are tied to historical meanings that can’t be taken lightly. When someone facing consequences for their actions claims to be the victim of a “witch hunt,” they’re callously using the imagery of actual historical violence. Or when two (non-indigenous) people making up after an argument talk about “burying the hatchet,” they’re appropriating Native American imagery without thinking about its history.

You can avoid some instances of unintentional bigotry or offensiveness by starting to pay more attention to the metaphorical phrases you use. Think about where the phrase comes from before you use it. And if you don’t know its history, look it up to determine if you’re casually perpetuating offensive ideas in its use. You may be surprised how many casually offensive terms are a normal part of your thought process. Identifying them is the first step to removing them from your regular vocabulary.

Learn more:

• CNN on everyday words and phrases with racist connotations.
• Radical Copyeditor lists thirty everyday phrases that perpetuate the oppression of indigenous people.

Always Be Learning

Language is constantly evolving, and the conversations around which words are acceptable and harmful are ongoing. In order to be an inclusive, compassionate writer, you have to commit to continual learning. 

Listen to people from various marginalized groups and backgrounds to better understand how they do and don’t like to be referred to and why (while also recognizing that there will often be variety in their opinions). Do your best to match your writing to what they say, and be open to feedback when you get something wrong. You won’t always get things right, but as long as you’re willing to always listen, show empathy, and do your best, you will get better at avoiding harmful language.

Some resources to help you along the way: 

• A Progressive’s Style Guide
• The Conscious Style Guide (sign up for the newsletter)
• The Radical Copyeditor