Styling for inclusion: how shaping a style guide shapes our discussions

This talk was given at AlterConf PDX. You can see a video of the talk here:

I want to talk to you about the word “literally” for a moment. When I tell you that I am literally freezing, you know I’m cold. But am I actually literally experiencing a concerning drop in my core temperature? Not so much. 

Despite my own feelings on the interchangeability of the words “literally” and “figuratively” (and do I ever have some opinions!), the reality is that we haven’t just suddenly agreed to switch the meaning of a word out of nowhere. Different communities use different words in different ways. Language grows and changes to cover new concepts constantly, like how the word “computer” used to refer to a person making calculations, but now refers to a bunch of different types of devices. These changes are routine, through conversation, slang, academic use, memes, translation and literally every other time we communicate. There is a reason English has a reputation for rifling through other languages’ pockets for loose nouns!

Trying to stop the growth of language is like shouting into the wind. Even if it makes you feel better, it’s not effective. And, honestly, most attempts to control language come with a lot of elitist and biased crap. (The history of the word “ain’t” is a basically a primer on classism and language.) 

We make plenty of tools to help us write and communicate, from linters to dictionaries. We create tools to make sure we get job titles and other details right. But those tools can be tools of oppression. When a journalist relies on references recommending obsolete, oppressive, or offensive terms as standard, they’re going to use those terms. It’s the easiest option, just like using someone’s deadname is easier than researching and respecting someone’s identity. Their audience will use those terms or approaches, too, because an authority just used them. There’s a ripple effect when we rely on tools created without considering their use and impact. 

We can see this in actual examples from actual tools: There’s a particularly awful example that The AP Stylebook updated last year. While “child prostitute” or “teenage prostitute” used to be acceptable under AP style, in 2016 the guide was updated to suggest that writers avoid using the word “prostitute” for anyone under the legal age of consent. That’s because the word “prostitute” implies a sex worker who is “voluntarily trading sex for money” and someone under the age of consent, by definition cannot voluntarily participate in sex in the first place, according to Tom Kent, one of the editors of The AP Stylebook. 

The AP Stylebook will definitely have more updates in the future, from new technology terms to updated discussions of sports statistics. In fact, that’s their entire business model: journalists are encouraged to buy a new copy every single year. Most of us only update our copies every couple of years, but we’re used to thinking about at least this one specific tool as something that needs to grow and change with the language it describes. 

That assumption of change is really useful when we talk about how to improve the systems and tools we rely on. It provides a framework where we can find ways to do better, ways to update our expectations as we learn, ways to improve on our communications. Sometimes it takes more time than we like to make these changes. (It took the Associated Press until 2016 to agree with the rest of us that “internet” shouldn’t be capitalized.) As it happens, though, there’s nothing to stop you from opening up a text doc and writing your own style guide. I’ve been doing that for years, which led me pretty much directly to giving this talk.

Writing about people is hard and I’ve messed up more than once. I’ve learned a lot of what I know at the expense of the people I’ve written about, because the tools I relied on were crap in one way or another. I started keeping a pre-publication list of everything I need to double check on every project because I misgendered an interview subject I only knew through email. I made an assumption and pushed publish. A few hours later, I got an incredibly kind email from that person pointing out my error. I apologized, but that wasn’t enough. I never want to make that error again, so I added a step to my workflow to ensure that I’ll do better. 

I try to do good work, but I’m sure I’ll make more mistakes in the future. When I do, I’ll apologize and try to find a way to do better. That, as Kronda has told us, is the job. 

For me, part of that process has been creating The Responsible Communication Style Guide. Basically, I wanted to take all of my tools and tricks and put them in a reference manual so I could improve my own work. Then I realized that sharing this sort of guide could help a couple of my fellow writers avoid making similar mistakes and that I could do some research to answer some questions I still had. 

Then — and this is the most important thing — I realized that writing this style guide by myself would be a huge mistake. Just like the top-down approach at organizations like the Associated Press, writing everything would be a way to guarantee that I got something else wrong. If we want to guarantee that our work is inclusive, thoughtful, and responsible, we need to create it in inclusive, thoughtful, and responsible ways. Sure, I had a list of questions, but I didn’t have useful answers. 

But I sure wasn’t going to ask anyone to work on fixing MY writing for free. So I worked with The Recompiler to run a Kickstarter. We met our goal mere hours before our campaign ended, giving us enough money to pay contributors and cover printing costs. That’s basically it. Folks, do not expect to get rich writing style guides. 

But we did pay our contributors! That’s one of the pieces about this project that makes me the happiest. One of the most wonderful feeling in the world is to say, hey, you, you’re awesome and you know stuff and would you please take this money right now? I strongly recommend it when you need a serious pick-me-up. Keep this recommendation in mind, though, because I’m about to have some feelings up here. 

Usually I have to talk about my work in a way that will convince everyone in the audience that they should pay for me to keep doing it. But in this room, I see people who not only have done that (thank you!) but who have helped me to do work that I consider important. That makes me feel like I have a certain amount of freedom here. So I want to say a couple of things in conclusion. 

I don’t think I’m the right person to have edited this style guide. I’m just a person who had the willingness and the time to do so. Focusing on this work, running a Kickstarter to fund it, and not relying on this book as my main source of income is incredibly privileged. I’ve tried to stay aware of that privilege throughout the process of making The Responsible Communication Style Guide a reality. The most effective strategy I’ve found is paying contributors, so that people other than me can afford to work on this project. It’s not a solved problem in any way, though, just like everything else about this project. We had several potential contributors who weren’t able to work on this project because we couldn’t pay enough to make this project a top priority.

I want to acknowledge that I don’t consider The Responsible Communication Style Guide complete. I have lists of improvements to make in upcoming editions, topics we need to add, and experts I need to pay. The first edition is just that. It’s a first iteration to at least give us a starting point to improve upon as we learn more and try new approaches. 

Given that we live under capitalism, the standard solution to both of my concerns is more money. I have to admit that I’m not optimistic about either capitalism or getting money for important work right now. Several communities I love are shutting down or scaling back right now, because there’s so little cash to be had. Even this conference today is bittersweet because I know there’s only one AlterConf left after this.

For the organizations that have the most money to give, things like diversity and inclusion aren’t a priority. When a inclusivity project can’t raise for $10,000 from an organization that spends that much just on “unisex” t-shirts, there’s something wrong. Sure, there are always organizations looking to buy diversity and inclusivity indulgences, but they don’t put money into it in the long-term.

You’re in this room. You probably already know all of this. But I want to ask you to do something when you go back to work next week. Go ask your employer to spend some money, preferably from outside some poorly-funded D-and-I initiative. Do the same thing next week, and the week after. Look at technical training budgets, continuing education credits, even the budget for holiday parties. Look for ways to move that money into the hands of people doing good work. 

Helping plan a party? Pick a catering company operated by a person of color.

Need CE credits for a professional certification? Check if there are CE trainers for your certification focused on accessibility.

Got a technical training budget? Choose the trainers who subsidize community work with technical training.

I’m not asking you to seize the means of production, but I am asking you to redirect the means of production every chance you get. I know that isn’t a particularly inspiring message, but it’s the one I’ve got right now. 

On that cheerful note, the last thing I want to do while I’m up here is acknowledge all of the people who have worked on The Responsible Communication Style Guide. I can’t name all of you in the time I have left, but I want to thank Audrey Eschright, our publisher, as well as our contributing editors Stephanie Morillo, Ellen Dash, Heidi Waterhouse, Melissa Chavez, and Anat Moskowitz, along with our designer, Mel Rainsberger. I may have done most of the cat-herding on this project, but there literally would not be a book without these people. 

Announcing the Portland Prospectus

I help with sponsorship at a lot of tech conferences here in Portland. Last week, someone even tried to give me money for a conference I’m not helping with because they assumed (correctly) that I knew how sponsorship worked for that conference. Apparently, I have a reputation.

I’ve had my own little cheat sheet on what tech conferences are happening when in Portland, along with who to talk to about speaking, sponsoring, and so forth. I realized I might as well pretty up that cheat sheet and make it available, since it will help sponsors work effectively with more tech events. So here’s what the Portland Prospectus contains:

  • My recommendations for getting the best value for your sponsorship money here in Portland if you’re hiring or marketing to developers, designers, and other tech industry professionals
  • A spotter’s guide to specialties and languages across different conferences
  • A list of the conferences happening here in Portland through the end of 2017 (based only on the conferences I have dates for)
  • Highlights of some local vendors sponsors can work with to amp up impact

Please note that I am not an organizer for most of these conferences and I haven’t necessarily talked to the organizers of each conference. I used information available online to create this document. If you see incorrect information, please let me know and I’ll update it right away.

I am asking you for your email address in exchange for this PDF. First, I’d like to be rewarded for my work, not just in creating this PDF, but also because I do a lot of free labor on tech conferences here in Portland. Knowing who is interested in sponsorship and how to reach you makes my life a lot easier, so, yeah, I’m charging you the currency I find most useful for access to my tools.

Second, I’m considering sending out an update version of the Portland Prospectus towards the end of the year. I plan to send out a notification of when the new version is up. I’m also considering sending some other updates, like information about when local calls for proposal close.

If you’re not in Portland, you’re still welcome to download this PDF and sponsor our local tech conferences. You’re also welcome to copy this concept for your local community — I’ll even give you some spreadsheet templates if you contact me. Then, please, send me a copy of your finished local prospectus!

Download the Portland Prospectus

* indicates required




Download My In-House Style Guide Template to Use However You Want

I’m excited to share the template I use for creating in-house style guides, as a reward for The Responsible Communication Style Guide Kickstarter reaching $10,000 in backing. Want to really improve your company’s communications? Back the Kickstarter today!

TL;DR: Here’s the link to download my in-house style guide template: the style guide as a .docx!

Keep reading for some context!

Whenever I sit down with a prospective client to work on their content, I ask about style guides: Does the organization or project rely on a particular style guide? How do they enforce style guidelines? How do they update the style guide?

I get a lot of blank stares. That’s okay, because very few of the organizations I work with are founded by trained content creators. While I know that anyone who already has a style guide in place will be easier to work with, I don’t consider a lack of a style guide a problem — at least before we start working together. I do insist, however, on making a style guide before we start on any other content projects. I need a style guide before I can create new content, audit old content, or even decide on what belongs in an editorial calendar.

Creating an in-house style guide isn’t that difficult of a process, provided you’ve made a couple dozen style guides over the length of your career. Part of that is experience. Part of that is building a template that can be customized to different organizations quickly. While I can’t give you a self-serve package of my expertise, I can give you the template that I’ve built up over the past decade or so.

I’m sharing this document as a .docx so you can easily adapt it to your own ends. You’ll want to start by reading through the style guide and adding in the information your organization needs to reference regularly (like exactly how to spell, space, and capitalize your company name). After that, you can share it with your team.

Remember, your style guide is a living document. Whenever new questions come up, add the answers to the guide. Whenever your organization hires a new person or releases a new product, add them to the guide. Whenever a content creator screws something up, add the information they need to avoid future problems to the guide. Schedule a regular review to update and clarify your in-house style guide. This template, by the way, is also a living document. I keep adding information to it, tweaking it, and looking for ways to improve it.

You’ll notice that there’s some information about writing inclusively in this guide. If this is a topic you’re just starting with, I recommend reading the white paper I released with Recompiler Media on quick changes your marketing team can make to dramatically increase your audience (PDF!) with an inclusive approach. If you aren’t thinking about inclusivity, you’re probably reaching only a fifth of your potential audience. If you are thinking about inclusivity, you can take your content to the next level by backing The Responsible Communication Style Guide Kickstarter.

The Responsible Communication Style Guide: A Kickstarter and an Explanation

I’m working on The Responsible Communication Style Guide with Recompiler Media. This project is something I’ve been thinking about for years and I wanted to write up how I got to this place.

Our Kickstarter is here — backing at the $15 level is the fastest way to get a copy of The Responsible Communication Style Guide to use in your own work.

CONTENT NOTES

This post is over 2,500 words. There’s some heavy emotional stuff in here (lived experience + the Holocaust, how language affects our lives, and diversity in technology). I do hope you’ll read the whole thing.

How to Screw Up as a Journalist in One Easy Step

I screwed up early in my career as a freelance writer: I conducted an email interview with an individual named “Chris” for an article I was working on. In the article, I referred to Chris with a male pronoun. My source emailed me immediately after reading the article to say that “Chris” was short for “Christine” and that she would appreciate me fixing the error.

Chris was super nice about the whole thing, making me think that I wasn’t the first person to make this particular mistake. Now I do some obsessive Google-ing if I’m not sure how to describe a person just from an interview — though even Google can’t always tell me enough information.

Ever since, I’ve also been looking for a guide or workshop or some sort of education on how to ask questions about identity without being offensive. Sure, asking someone their pronouns is one of my standard interview questions (along with how to spell their name and what their professional title is), but that’s not enough.

  • How do you even begin to ask a trans person about referring to them by their dead name if you’re writing about them during a time when they still used that name?
  • How do you make sure that unconscious bias doesn’t influence your writing?
  • How do you write about someone engaged in activism without bringing an internet shitstorm down on their heads?
  • Heck, how do you even determine if you’re only telling stories about people like you or if you’re finding diverse sources or stories?

I don’t have the one true answer to all these questions. Figuring out how to handle these sorts of topics requires both empathy and context. Context, in turn, requires lived experience.

What is ‘lived experience?’ Lived experience, or the experiences, emotions, and impressions of a person living as a member of a minority, is easily dismissed as a buzzword from a women’s studies class. Hanging out in tech circles, I mostly hear people talking about their lived experiences and how they differ from what other people may see (such as a woman talking about an act of discrimination, only to be told by a man that he’s never seen any problems in the industry). While I don’t think that this sort of gaslighting should be dismissed, there are even bigger dangers to ignoring others’ lived experience: My paternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He spent six years in concentration camps. When he was liberated in 1945, he was 18. He weighed 85 pounds. In the years that followed, my grandfather encountered Holocaust deniers. These people told my grandfather that the hell he went through never happened.

I don’t want to turn this blog post into an example of Godwin’s Law, but every time I hear someone discounting lived experience, I see them become a little more willing to accept anti-Semitism and other bigotry. Suffice it to say that I strongly believe in the importance of involving someone with lived experience when creating training materials about their identity, history, community, and other related topics.

Back to the Question at Hand: Improving Our Ability to Communicate

At the same time, expecting anyone (no matter their lived experience, expertise, or knowledge) to educate either individuals or organizations purely out of the goodness of their heart is both rude and unreasonable. My landlord doesn’t let me live in my apartment out of the goodness of its warm, fuzzy, corporate heart, so I need to spend my time in a way that gets my rent paid — and I expect the same to be true of every human I encounter. (Kronda Adair has written several brilliant posts on this topic — start with this post.) In the event we all wind up living in a communist utopia, remind me to revisit this point.

That means paying multiple editors to look over my work who can bring the right context to it, right? Since I don’t have a lot of money, I generally can’t afford to work with more than one editor on a project. As it happens, since I write for the web, I often can’t afford to work with even one editor.

When I’m flying without a grammatical net, there are some options for improving my writing without spending a ton of money:

  • I use a ton of technology. There are tools to analyze common grammatical mistakes, such as the spell check tool built into most word processors. But there are also tools that do more specific editing tasks, such as the Hemingway app, which helps writers to follow Hemingway’s writing advice (limited adjectives and adverbs, short sentence structures and so on).
  • I got an education in writing and communications, and then kept learning. I have a couple of degrees in communication, which included loads of classes on writing. I also still read a ridiculous amount about writing. I kept learning after getting a degree, using self-education materials available from experts, ranging from writing hacks to full-fledged textbooks. A degree isn’t necessary in this field and an in-person class isn’t even required.
  • Lastly, I adore my style guide. I don’t (usually) sleep with the AP Stylebook, but I still keep both the digital and print copies handy. I also own a bunch of other style guides. I ask the publications I write for if they have their own style guides. I also have made my own style guides, both for individual publications I work on and more generally (i.e., I’ll go to bat with an editor to make sure ‘internet’ is not capitalized).

The resources for writing responsibly and ethically are few and far between. During my education, the closest I got to a class on how to write with some level of sensitivity was a graduate-level course on how to write about controversial topics — where ‘controversial’ was read as ‘political’ or ‘religious’ more than anything else. (Side note: That class was taught by Arthur Magida, author of How to Be a Perfect Stranger, which I have referred to as The Book that Keeps Me From Screwing Up Other People’s Weddings. I highly recommended it.)

That particular class was incredibly valuable, but I had to wait until I was working on a master’s degree to have an instructor start talking about how to start thinking about dealing with difficult topics, despite taking my first journalism class in middle school. How is there not a basic class in every journalism, public relations, and marketing program on how to write for diverse audiences? We teach basic interviewing techniques, like how to ask a question to high school journalism classes, but fail to teach those same students which questions to ask or who to ask questions of. I don’t know what your student paper looked like, but mine didn’t exactly reflect the demographics of our student body. It reflected the perspectives of the teachers leading the class and of the kids in accelerated English classes — despite having a big ESL program at our school, I can’t remember a single ESL student writing for the student paper. I’m not advocating for fully restructuring journalism (yet!) but we do need to make a point of teaching empathy in journalism.

We’re at the beginning of conversations about representation in the media. There are a few organizations now that try to track statistics on authors and writers, like the VIDA Count. Getting more diverse writers (and other media makers) into big publications is just a first step. Telling stories of underrepresented demographics is the next step — and I’m not talking about tokenism. Pro tip: it’s perfectly fine to have an article about a technical project led by a woman without every asking her about whether she thinks tech is a tough industry for women. As a matter of fact, skipping the focus on how different the story’s subject is means that you get to spend more time on how cool the actual project is.

Some individuals and organizations have started working on this problem, but many resources are fragmented. I have more than a dozen style guides and media guides just for covering religion. (I’ll get more into what’s out there in another post I’m already working on.)

We still have a long way to go to get to a truly diverse media scene, though. I keep thinking of our current media landscape as the beginning of a very long journey — we’re still outfitting ourselves for the trek and don’t really know what’s on the trail ahead. We won’t even know some of the work we need to do to get to that far off Wonderland until we get on the road. We know that we need to remodel or replace many of the systems in place to produce journalism and other media, but until that work is done, we won’t know many of the steps that come after.

Let’s Talk Ideals and Infrastructure for Writers

In my ideal world, I could just use pronouns that aren’t based on gender for writing and everything else. I recognize that I have to stick to the current system if I want readers to be able to understand everything I publish, but I certainly don’t like the existing system.

Until there’s a good opportunity for a linguistic revolution, I’m focused on making the existing system better. That means starting with the writers who make the articles, blog posts, and other things we read (along with the scripts for plenty of the audio and video content we see, too). Style guides are a good starting point for talking about how we cover things because we’re already used to looking up details we might get wrong.

In fact, some organizations have put out specialized style guides for how writers can cover their specific communities. These resources are all over the place, however, and sometimes contradictory. Creating a standard resource is the first step to making improvements in who writes what stories. Having discussions about diversity and inclusion before publishing anything will, at least, limit some of the more thoughtless headlines and references that we see constantly. As a personal goal, I’d like to see publishers avoid referring to an Olympic athlete as someone else’s wife.

I have thought of other formats this style guide could take. I kept coming back to the idea of doing the research and running an in-person workshop, geared towards newsrooms. But while we clearly need more educational materials about writing responsibly, style guides have more power than classes. I’ve taken more writing classes than I can count. I don’t remember where all the handouts and notes are from those classes, though I can point to the occasional writing hack and say that I picked it up from a particular instructor. You could have swapped out most of my writing teachers for other writing teachers and I would never have noticed.

But taking my AP Stylebook from me would turn me into a mess. And while I could manage if you took my Chicago Manual of Style or one of the other style guides I rely on, I would be pretty unhappy. These reference books have impacted my writing far more than anything or anyone else.

Making a Real Difference with The Responsible Communication Style Guide

I’ve spent the past couple of years casually talking about making a style guide that answers some of the questions I have. Audrey Eschright, the publisher ofthe Recompiler, heard me talking about the idea for The Responsible Communication Style Guide this spring. She said that she wanted something similar and would be willing to work on the project.

Working with Audrey is amazing — we’re on the same page about everything except whether there’s a hyphen in ‘ebook’ (I’m anti-hyphen, while Audrey is pro-hyphen, if you’re wondering). Perhaps the most important thing we agree on is how to construct The Responsible Communication Style Guide. Our particular manifesto for this project can be broken down into the following bullet points:

  • We’re hiring the right people to write each of these sections and we’re paying them. None of that crap about asking people to educate us for free here.
  • We’re creating a printed resource, as well as a website. Different people use different formats (and we’ve got some cool ideas for even more approaches once we’ve got the initial iteration ready).
  • We’re developing training around The Responsible Communication Style Guide, because people only use resources they have some familiarity with.
  • We agree that this sort of style guide isn’t just about writing clearly. It’s also about being able to communicate in a manner that doesn’t harm anyone: writers, editors, and publishers influence culture and attitudes so directly that we have an obligation to use that power responsibly.

Yes, we’re both absolutely scratching our own itch with The Responsible Communication Style Guide. But we’re also creating something that we know there’s a need for — and something with the potential to guide major conversations in technology. Yes, journalists working in this space need the guide. But there’s more room than that in the long run. Ultimately, everyone in technology is a writer: a programmer writes documentation, technical blog posts, and internal talks, even if they never publish a single word outside of an employer’s media. Designers, marketers, and even business analysts create reams of written material every day.

This guide gives people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as writers a starting point for thinking, talking, and, yes, writing, about users in an empathetic way. There’s a real potential for The Responsible Communication Style Guide to equip us for important conversations by providing an introduction to concepts of identity and a framework for writing about those concepts.

So here we are. There’s a big chunk of my heart and soul up on Kickstarter right now. I’m a bit terrified, especially of getting things wrong with the people who I want to contribute to The Responsible Communication Style Guide. I’m ridiculously hopeful about what bringing this project to life means for the books and blogs I’ll read in the future. I’m wound up waiting to see who will back this project. We’ve got just under a month to make this happen. Let’s go.

We Need Your Help

If you are as excited as I am, we are looking for help!

  • Please consider backing our project, even at a low level. If everyone just bought an ebook copy at the $15 level, we would need just over 1,300 backers — and there are far more than 1,300 people writing about these topics.
  • Please share our Kickstarter with everyone who you think might be interested. From our perspective, that means journalists, marketers, speakers, and other folks who write publicly. But once the Responsible Communication Style Guide is a reality, we expect people to use it in ways we never considered.
  • Please let us know if you think of any ways to make this material more accessible to your community. We have some ideas (I want a linter for writing!), some of which will be incorporated into this first iteration of the guide and some of which we’ll work on after the Kickstarter (including my hopes for a linter).

Thank you for reading this whole long post and thank you for your help.

The Responsible Communication Style Guide: A Kickstarter and an Explanation

TL;DR

I’m working on The Responsible Communication Style Guide with Recompiler Media. This project is something I’ve been thinking about for years and I wanted to write up how I got to this place.

Our Kickstarter is here — backing at the $15 level is the fastest way to get a copy of The Responsible Communication Style Guide to use in your own work.

CONTENT NOTES

This post is over 2,500 words. There’s some heavy emotional stuff in here (lived experience + the Holocaust, how language affects our lives, and diversity in technology). I do hope you’ll read the whole thing.

How to Screw Up as a Journalist in One Easy Step

I screwed up early in my career as a freelance writer: I conducted an email interview with an individual named “Chris” for an article I was working on. In the article, I referred to Chris with a male pronoun. My source emailed me immediately after reading the article to say that “Chris” was short for “Christine” and that she would appreciate me fixing the error.

Chris was super nice about the whole thing, making me think that I wasn’t the first person to make this particular mistake. Now I do some obsessive Google-ing if I’m not sure how to describe a person just from an interview — though even Google can’t always tell me enough information.

Ever since, I’ve also been looking for a guide or workshop or some sort of education on how to ask questions about identity without being offensive. Sure, asking someone their pronouns is one of my standard interview questions (along with how to spell their name and what their professional title is), but that’s not enough.

  • How do you even begin to ask a trans person about referring to them by their dead name if you’re writing about them during a time when they still used that name?
  • How do you make sure that unconscious bias doesn’t influence your writing?
  • How do you write about someone engaged in activism without bringing an internet shitstorm down on their heads?
  • Heck, how do you even determine if you’re only telling stories about people like you or if you’re finding diverse sources or stories?

I don’t have the one true answer to all these questions. Figuring out how to handle these sorts of topics requires both empathy and context. Context, in turn, requires lived experience.

What is ‘lived experience?’ Lived experience, or the experiences, emotions, and impressions of a person living as a member of a minority, is easily dismissed as a buzzword from a women’s studies class. Hanging out in tech circles, I mostly hear people talking about their lived experiences and how they differ from what other people may see (such as a woman talking about an act of discrimination, only to be told by a man that he’s never seen any problems in the industry). While I don’t think that this sort of gaslighting should be dismissed, there are even bigger dangers to ignoring others’ lived experience: My paternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He spent six years in concentration camps. When he was liberated in 1945, he was 18. He weighed 85 pounds. In the years that followed, my grandfather encountered Holocaust deniers. These people told my grandfather that the hell he went through never happened.

I don’t want to turn this blog post into an example of Godwin’s Law, but every time I hear someone discounting lived experience, I see them become a little more willing to accept anti-Semitism and other bigotry. Suffice it to say that I strongly believe in the importance of involving someone with lived experience when creating training materials about their identity, history, community, and other related topics.

Back to the Question at Hand: Improving Our Ability to Communicate

At the same time, expecting anyone (no matter their lived experience, expertise, or knowledge) to educate either individuals or organizations purely out of the goodness of their heart is both rude and unreasonable. My landlord doesn’t let me live in my apartment out of the goodness of its warm, fuzzy, corporate heart, so I need to spend my time in a way that gets my rent paid — and I expect the same to be true of every human I encounter. (Kronda Adair has written several brilliant posts on this topic — start with this post.) In the event we all wind up living in a communist utopia, remind me to revisit this point.

That means paying multiple editors to look over my work who can bring the right context to it, right? Since I don’t have a lot of money, I generally can’t afford to work with more than one editor on a project. As it happens, since I write for the web, I often can’t afford to work with even one editor.

When I’m flying without a grammatical net, there are some options for improving my writing without spending a ton of money:

  • I use a ton of technology. There are tools to analyze common grammatical mistakes, such as the spell check tool built into most word processors. But there are also tools that do more specific editing tasks, such as the Hemingway app, which helps writers to follow Hemingway’s writing advice (limited adjectives and adverbs, short sentence structures and so on).
  • I got an education in writing and communications, and then kept learning. I have a couple of degrees in communication, which included loads of classes on writing. I also still read a ridiculous amount about writing. I kept learning after getting a degree, using self-education materials available from experts, ranging from writing hacks to full-fledged textbooks. A degree isn’t necessary in this field and an in-person class isn’t even required.
  • Lastly, I adore my style guide. I don’t (usually) sleep with the AP Stylebook, but I still keep both the digital and print copies handy. I also own a bunch of other style guides. I ask the publications I write for if they have their own style guides. I also have made my own style guides, both for individual publications I work on and more generally (i.e., I’ll go to bat with an editor to make sure ‘internet’ is not capitalized).

The resources for writing responsibly and ethically are few and far between. During my education, the closest I got to a class on how to write with some level of sensitivity was a graduate-level course on how to write about controversial topics — where ‘controversial’ was read as ‘political’ or ‘religious’ more than anything else. (Side note: That class was taught by Arthur Magida, author of How to Be a Perfect Stranger, which I have referred to as The Book that Keeps Me From Screwing Up Other People’s Weddings. I highly recommended it.)

That particular class was incredibly valuable, but I had to wait until I was working on a master’s degree to have an instructor start talking about how to start thinking about dealing with difficult topics, despite taking my first journalism class in middle school. How is there not a basic class in every journalism, public relations, and marketing program on how to write for diverse audiences? We teach basic interviewing techniques, like how to ask a question to high school journalism classes, but fail to teach those same students which questions to ask or who to ask questions of. I don’t know what your student paper looked like, but mine didn’t exactly reflect the demographics of our student body. It reflected the perspectives of the teachers leading the class and of the kids in accelerated English classes — despite having a big ESL program at our school, I can’t remember a single ESL student writing for the student paper. I’m not advocating for fully restructuring journalism (yet!) but we do need to make a point of teaching empathy in journalism.

We’re at the beginning of conversations about representation in the media. There are a few organizations now that try to track statistics on authors and writers, like the VIDA Count. Getting more diverse writers (and other media makers) into big publications is just a first step. Telling stories of underrepresented demographics is the next step — and I’m not talking about tokenism. Pro tip: it’s perfectly fine to have an article about a technical project led by a woman without ever asking her about whether she thinks tech is a tough industry for women. As a matter of fact, skipping the focus on how different the story’s subject is means that you get to spend more time on how cool the actual project is.

Some individuals and organizations have started working on this problem, but many resources are fragmented. I have more than a dozen style guides and media guides just for covering religion. (I’ll get more into what’s out there in another post I’m already working on.)

We still have a long way to go to get to a truly diverse media scene, though. I keep thinking of our current media landscape as the beginning of a very long journey — we’re still outfitting ourselves for the trek and don’t really know what’s on the trail ahead. We won’t even know some of the work we need to do to get to that far off Wonderland until we get on the road. We know that we need to remodel or replace many of the systems in place to produce journalism and other media, but until that work is done, we won’t know many of the steps that come after.

Let’s Talk Ideals and Infrastructure for Writers

In my ideal world, I could just use pronouns that aren’t based on gender for writing and everything else. I recognize that I have to stick to the current system if I want readers to be able to understand everything I publish, but I certainly don’t like the existing system.

Until there’s a good opportunity for a linguistic revolution, I’m focused on making the existing system better. That means starting with the writers who make the articles, blog posts, and other things we read (along with the scripts for plenty of the audio and video content we see, too). Style guides are a good starting point for talking about how we cover things because we’re already used to looking up details we might get wrong.

In fact, some organizations have put out specialized style guides for how writers can cover their specific communities. These resources are all over the place, however, and sometimes contradictory. Creating a standard resource is the first step to making improvements in who writes what stories. Having discussions about diversity and inclusion before publishing anything will, at least, limit some of the more thoughtless headlines and references that we see constantly. As a personal goal, I’d like to see publishers avoid referring to an Olympic athlete as someone else’s wife.

I have thought of other formats this style guide could take. I kept coming back to the idea of doing the research and running an in-person workshop, geared towards newsrooms. But while we clearly need more educational materials about writing responsibly, style guides have more power than classes. I’ve taken more writing classes than I can count. I don’t remember where all the handouts and notes are from those classes, though I can point to the occasional writing hack and say that I picked it up from a particular instructor. You could have swapped out most of my writing teachers for other writing teachers and I would never have noticed.

But taking my AP Stylebook from me would turn me into a mess. And while I could manage if you took my Chicago Manual of Style or one of the other style guides I rely on, I would be pretty unhappy. These reference books have impacted my writing far more than anything or anyone else.

Making a Real Difference with The Responsible Communication Style Guide

I’ve spent the past couple of years casually talking about making a style guide that answers some of the questions I have. Audrey Eschright, the publisher of the Recompiler, heard me talking about the idea for The Responsible Communication Style Guide this spring. She said that she wanted something similar and would be willing to work on the project.

Working with Audrey is amazing — we’re on the same page about everything except whether there’s a hyphen in ‘ebook’ (I’m anti-hyphen, while Audrey is pro-hyphen, if you’re wondering). Perhaps the most important thing we agree on is how to construct The Responsible Communication Style Guide. Our particular manifesto for this project can be broken down into the following bullet points:

  • We’re hiring the right people to write each of these sections and we’re paying them. None of that crap about asking people to educate us for free here.
  • We’re creating a printed resource, as well as a website. Different people use different formats (and we’ve got some cool ideas for even more approaches once we’ve got the initial iteration ready).
  • We’re developing training around The Responsible Communication Style Guide, because people only use resources they have some familiarity with.
  • We agree that this sort of style guide isn’t just about writing clearly. It’s also about being able to communicate in a manner that doesn’t harm anyone: writers, editors, and publishers influence culture and attitudes so directly that we have an obligation to use that power responsibly.

Yes, we’re both absolutely scratching our own itch with The Responsible Communication Style Guide. But we’re also creating something that we know there’s a need for — and something with the potential to guide major conversations in technology. Yes, journalists working in this space need the guide. But there’s more room than that in the long run. Ultimately, everyone in technology is a writer: a programmer writes documentation, technical blog posts, and internal talks, even if they never publish a single word outside of an employer’s media. Designers, marketers, and even business analysts create reams of written material every day.

This guide gives people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as writers a starting point for thinking, talking, and, yes, writing, about users in an empathetic way. There’s a real potential for The Responsible Communication Style Guide to equip us for important conversations by providing an introduction to concepts of identity and a framework for writing about those concepts.

So here we are. There’s a big chunk of my heart and soul up on Kickstarter right now. I’m a bit terrified, especially of getting things wrong with the people who I want to contribute to The Responsible Communication Style Guide. I’m ridiculously hopeful about what bringing this project to life means for the books and blogs I’ll read in the future. I’m wound up waiting to see who will back this project. We’ve got just under a month to make this happen. Let’s go.

We Need Your Help

If you are as excited as I am, we are looking for help!

  • Please consider backing our project, even at a low level. If everyone just bought an ebook copy at the $15 level, we would need just over 1,300 backers — and there are far more than 1,300 people writing about these topics.
  • Please share our Kickstarter with everyone who you think might be interested. From our perspective, that means journalists, marketers, speakers, and other folks who write publicly. But once the Responsible Communication Style Guide is a reality, we expect people to use it in ways we never considered.
  • Please let us know if you think of any ways to make this material more accessible to your community. We have some ideas (I want a linter for writing!), some of which will be incorporated into this first iteration of the guide and some of which we’ll work on after the Kickstarter (including my hopes for a linter).

Thank you for reading this whole long post and thank you for your help.

Put Your Damn Money Where Your Mouth Is

Diversity is important to tech, right?

We want the makeup of our company to reflect the vast range of people who use Twitter. Doing so will help us build a product to better serve people around the world. — Twitter

Intel is committed to setting the industry standard for a diverse and inclusive workplace culture. — Intel

At Facebook, we value the impact that every individual can have. We are dedicated to creating an environment where people can be their authentic selves and share their own diverse backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and ideas. — Facebook

Most of these companies have backed their words with money — funds that are earmarked for improving diversity. And they do back some good things, like events specifically meant for the demographics those companies are trying to add to their own workforces.

But the money that most tech companies have set aside for diversity isn’t going towards the infrastructure necessary to truly create a sustainably inclusive tech industry.

I’ve been an organizer with the local PyLadies group for a few years now, and we have no shortage of companies that want to buy us pizza so that they can tell our members about job opportunities. When someone talks about offering childcare at broader meetups, everyone agrees that the idea is sound, but no one wants to pay for it. The same is true for tech conferences. As co-chair of Open Source Bridge this year, I hoped to find a sponsor specifically for childcare — a simple change that would make it easier for attendees with families. The business case seems pretty obvious: no matter their gender, senior programmers routinely have families. If those programmers work remotely, are single parents, or split care with another parent, finding childcare can be difficult. Weekend conferences, in particular, can be hard because a parent might have to leave their children with someone overnight.

Providing childcare means that parents are more likely to attend conferences or other events and therefore have a better chance of interacting with a recruiter for a given company. That sort of infrastructure dramatically improves the number of people able to attend.

Adding infrastructure like childcare services to the technology industry’s norms is a prerequisite for making the industry more diverse. Recruiters have to be able to find diverse candidates if they’re going to connect them with employers. That means funding the infrastructure that gets those diverse candidates into the room.

So why is it so hard to get sponsors for things that make diverse conference attendance easier, even for relatively inexpensive additions like providing ASL interpreters?

I offered myself up as a walking billboard in our crowdfunding campaign in order to cover our childcare costs at Open Source Bridge. I asked numerous sponsors if they would be interested in being our childcare sponsor. The lack of enthusiasm compared to our standard sponsorship levels and even compared to sponsoring diversity scholarships was obvious. (Surprise: Even guaranteeing that a company get their logo on one of the most visible people at a given conference isn’t enough to get money for childcare. We managed to cover the cost of childcare, but it was a near thing.)

Apparently the name on the label is very important to sponsors: specifically labeling a sponsorship level as a diversity opportunity gets potential backers excited because they like having their names associated with the word ‘diversity.’

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for diversity scholarships. They play an important role in making conferences more accessible. But each scholarship only helps one person. The right infrastructure will make tech events, along with the rest of the industry, more accessible to a much larger number. I may be hung up on childcare, but by offering childcare at no additional costs makes a world of difference for people who can afford a ticket to a conference but can’t afford the $100+ cost of a babysitter for a single day . For instance, think about developers whose employers will pay for their ticket and travel but won’t cover any other costs. And when you consider that multiple attendees will face that sort of expense, eliminating the cost of childcare means multiple attendees will find a conference financially accessible.

From a strict business perspective, this is ridiculous. And it’s easy enough to fix, provided tech companies truly want the diversity they keep talking about.

It’s time for tech companies to put their money where their mouths are.

In terms of conference sponsorships, that means funding real accessibility. The bullet points below are my personal wish list for conferences I run, but every conference needs different things:

  • An accessible venue
  • On-site, free childcare
  • Transcription and ASL interpretation
  • Multiple food options, including at snack times (vegan, halal, etc.)
  • Swag other than t-shirts

(Liz Abinante has a more exhaustive list here.)

There are plenty of other opportunities to develop better infrastructure in the tech industry in general, too:

  • Scholarship funds (not just individual scholarships) for code schools
  • Dry (alcohol-free) parties and other events
  • Childcare for meetups and other networking events

Dry events, in particular, would be a welcome addition. There is no doubt that the tech industry has a drinking problem. Even casual meetups often focus as much around a keg as they do around a technical talk. That excludes so many people: folks who have alcohol intolerances, folks who are pregnant, folks who need to drive home, and — perhaps the elephant in the room—folks who struggle with sobriety. An estimated one in 12 people have problems with alcohol abuse; they’re at every meetup, happy hour, conference, or other tech event we go to and have to face the choice of fitting in or taking care of themselves. And yet, many of these events don’t even have an alternative to drinking (asking for water can be difficult). We need not only alternative beverages, but alternative types of events that don’t rely on booze.

Because this sort of infrastructure doesn’t yet exist, many people are shut out of the tech industry. If you can’t go to the next networking happy hour for tech companies in your town — whether you can’t get a sitter, you can’t drink, or for some other reason — your chances of getting a job in the tech industry go way down.

A few people make it in anyhow, by paying what amounts to a tax on being more diverse than the next programmer over: finding a way to pay for whatever tools necessary to cover the cost of fitting in is the only way past those problems. In an ideal world, tech companies should give giant signing bonuses to candidates who improve their diversity numbers, if only to cover those candidates’ costs of getting into the industry in the first place.

The wage gap makes me think that sort of bonus will never happen, so pay for the infrastructure your company needs to recruit these people.

Want an easy way to start putting your money into the infrastructure the tech industry really needs? Cut a check to an organization today. Even $25 makes a difference, so if you benefit from that aforementioned wage gap, consider putting money in personally as well as through a company.

The Discussion We Need to Have at #APIStrat

While APIstrat is an interesting conference (I’m always up for learning about amazing technical advances) I feel like a tsunami is approaching. I can sense it and I’m just waiting to hear the sirens go off.

But most of the other folks at APIStrat seem to feel like they’ve caught the edge of the big wave and they can just ride it down. There’s this sense that the entire concept of APIs are well established in the world; that the developers we work with are coming up with ever-increasingly brilliant ways to use our APIs and that all that is left do is create a few more APIs for a few more developers.

And, yet, most of the APIs we’re talking about touch surprisingly few lives. It’s rare to even hear about an API used to streamline the process of applying for veterans’ benefits or to improve the cash flow of the bodega on the corner.

APIs don’t have a trickle-down effect that we can rely on to help reach those people being left out of this new evolution of work. Without concerted effort to bring more people to the table, we can’t assume that we’ve done everything possible to truly disrupt the organizations that came before.

Part of this problem is a question of diversity — when most developers have shared worldview, seeing the missing pieces of the API puzzle is difficult. When you’ve never gone through the process of applying for food stamps, you can’t really come up with a way to make that experience work better.

Waiting for someone to fix the diversity numbers in the tech industry isn’t going to move us any closer to that tsunami. The underlying issue there is not that women and other marginalized groups don’t have access to STEM education (at least in the US), it’s that we keep entering the industry and keep facing uncomfortable situations where the only healthy option is to drop out of tech and do something where we won’t face as many micro aggressions, unequal hiring efforts, or doxxing attacks.

Before you ever start working on an API, you truly need to ‘get out of the building,’ to steal a phrase from Steve Blank. There are a wealth of opportunities out there for developers who step outside of their own worldview and examine what people who are far different from you need in their day-to-day lives. The business case should be obvious (if your API is a utility, selling access to it is a piece of cake), but you should also think about the opportunity to leave the world a little better than you found it.

Furthermore, think about how absolutely simple you can make using your API. Frankly, building on top of a good API shouldn’t require programming skills. IFTTT is a good example of what can be done in that direction, but there are also plenty of ways to create sample apps that just require someone to figure out a little copying and pasting in order to adapt to their own lives.

We have a chance to get this right. We have a chance to build a fundamentally better world — a place I’d love to live in — but we have to actively pursue doing the right thing. We cannot wait for every single person on the planet to learn to code. We cannot hope that they’ll scratch their own itches, because there’s no chance in hell of that happening.

So here’s your call to action:

  • Start reading and learning. Don’t assume you know about anything except how to build a great API. Start with “The Unexotic Underclass” (http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/) — it’s a short essay that you’ll read through quickly. Subscribe to Model View Culture (modelviewculture.com) and The Recompiler (recompilermag.com). Work your way through the 101-Level Reading List (http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-101level-reader-books-to-help-you-better-understand-your-biases-and-the-lived-experiences).
  • Spend time around people who are very different than you. Volunteer for organizations that bring you into contact with people who don’t own computers. Work with homeless shelters, the Boys and Girls Club, and anyone else who needs a little help.
  • Build a network outside of tech. Find people who you can run ideas by, as well as get ideas from, when you’re deciding what to build next. Look as far afield as you possibly can. Make sure that those people can use your API on some level, even if it’s just through a little web app you throw together for that purpose.

The PyDX Post-Mortem

We spent over a year planning PyDX. From my perspective, the result was worth every bit of stress. I’ve been thinking about what I want to say about the conference now that it’s over. I’ve stopped and started this post a dozen times so far. Several versions have been downright sappy.

Instead, here’s the top five things that stuck out for me during PyDX.

1. Bake Diversity in from the Start; It’s Not Something to Add Later

I have no shame when it comes to talking about diversity numbers in order to drum up sponsors, but I actually feel good about how we PyDX organizers handled questions of how to make our conference more diverse. We focused on what real people needed to feel comfortable showing up to a conference — providing a safe environment, offering child care, even small group opportunities.

  • We came within four tickets of selling out.
  • We provided full scholarships to more than 90 percent of applicants, and were able to offer free tickets to the rest through our volunteer program.
  • We didn’t keep official numbers on diversity, but I made some informal counts. About half our attendees and speakers were diverse on some axis.

We didn’t have to focus on creating diversity when we already had a space that welcomed diversity in — and we responded directly to what people told us they needed to be able to attend. Remember, you can’t assume you know what anyone else needs.

Given that I attended a conference earlier this year that was exceedingly proud that 15 percent of attendees were women, I feel great about PyDX on this front.

2. Technical Talks Don’t Get All That Much Love, Surprisingly

I was obnoxiously proud of our speaker line-up, but I was surprised by what attendees responded to most enthusiastically. Looking at social media during the conference and talking to attendees afterwards, everyone was excited by talks that focused less on code — talks about topics like how to learn and how to build culture did really well.

The exceptions — the technical talks that got rave reviews — all had one of two key characteristics. Either they were workshops, where attendees participated and left with code of their own, or they were doing something far outside of typical Python projects, like making music,

Just about all of the talks went well, by the way. I’m not critiquing any of our speakers here. I’m speaking solely about what attendees were most excited by.

3. Not Screwing Up Codes of Conduct Requires Planning

I strongly believe that having a code of conduct is a minimum requirement for a conference (as well as smaller events and even occasional meetups). Having one sets expectations and creates a safer environment for every single attendee.

Organizing PyDX has only solidified my belief. The experience also highlighted some areas where we can make setting up and enforcing codes of conduct much easier — PyDX was a learning experience, because I’ve usually only been in a position to think about codes of conduct for smaller events.

These are my key takeaways:

  • Create an incident response plan in advance. You never want to be trying to figure out how to deal with a specific issue in the moment, especially when you’re already stressed out of your mind about whether the keynote speaker’s laptop is going to work properly with the A/V equipment.
  • Talk to an expert when creating your incident response plan. We actually didn’t write our own plan — instead, Audrey Eschright sat down with us and went over potential issues and how we wanted to handle them. She put that information together into a document we could refer to during the conference and that had enough detail that we could hand it to a volunteer if need be. Budget the money for that sort of expertise; it’s far cheaper than a lawyer after the fact.
  • Every single organizer and volunteer is on duty for code of conduct issues. You should absolutely have a point person, but any attendee facing a problem will talk first with the staff member they most trust who they can catch alone. And those conversations are going to come up unexpectedly — no matter the events I’ve attended, restrooms are de facto meeting rooms because most people feel they can safely talk about anything there.

4. Venues Control So Many Things and They Could Use Their Power for Good

Our venue was our single largest expense. Our venue was also the most constraining factor in planning PyDX. Until we’d found a venue, we couldn’t figure out food, childcare, or even the actual dates of the conference.

First off, the UO White Stag Block was a great venue to work with. They were able to meet most of our requirements right away and there was really only one request we made that couldn’t be met, due to the classes that were in session in the building during our conference.

That said, any venue winds up controlling a lot of how a given conference runs. We had to work within our venue’s constraints:

  • We could only use specific tape for hanging anything on the walls.
  • We could only use catering that had already been approved by the building.
  • We had to have insurance for the event.

That last constraint has kept me thinking: Insurance is required in order to fix any problem that occurs during the conference, including legal dilemmas. Why don’t venues have similar expectations for tools that mitigate risk, like codes of conduct? Isn’t requiring events to do more work to avoid any problems or negative attention more cost effective for venues?

5. The Amount of Help People Offer is Amazing

PyDX is truly a community conference. We had two larger sponsors: MailChimp and Anaconda, both of whom made a major difference in our ability to put on the conference. But around 80 percent of our funding came either directly from ticket sales or from local companies supporting the conference (including a lot of consultants and other small businesses!).

I feel like everyone I spoke to in the weeks leading up to PyDX offered to help in some way. The whole experience has been an important lesson in gratitude for me — a reminder that people will help if you just remember to ask. A few will even go out of their way to help without the request.

Thank you to everyone who made PyDX a reality.

And for those inquiring minds who want to know, we were four tickets short of selling out, so I’m not getting the tattoo. At least, I’m not getting it this year.