We're all worthy of feeling included and valued in all aspects of our lives. There’s still work to do to ensure diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity in the business world. Whether in internal communication or external marketing, the way your brand speaks is a clear predictor of how it will behave.
Inclusive language is one way to dissolve polarizing views and align the impact of your words with your intentions. It's about more than just avoiding offensive terms. Do you know the history, connotation, and effect of your words? Do they align with your brand, values, and readers?
Acrolinx comes with presets that meet a lot of content needs. These presets give you the freedom to choose the guidance you want, so there’s no need to adjust each individual guideline.
With the presets in Inclusive Language, you can decide what you want to include in your Acrolinx checks. If you're just starting to assess inclusivity in your written content, you might select Inclusive (Gender). This enables gender-related guidelines and more basic guidelines that everyone should follow. To incorporate disability-related guidelines, simply switch to the preset Inclusive (Gender and Disability). If you want to make sure that your content is inclusive on every level, choose Inclusive (All). You can also choose to optimize your content for use with screen readers with Inclusive (Accessibility).
To select a preset, follow these steps:
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Go to Style > Style guides and click the name of the style guide you'd like to edit.
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Click on the goal Inclusive Language to expand it.
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Select the preset Inclusive (Gender), Inclusive (Gender and Disability), Inclusive (All), or Inclusive (Accessibility) from the dropdown.
You can of course make changes to the individual guidelines to create a custom preset. See Fine-tune your Goals.
Warning
Careful, you can only create one custom preset for each goal within a style guide.
When you drill down into the guidance, you’ll find several guideline groups.
|
Guideline Group |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Respectful Language |
Some words and phrases contribute to harmful stereotypes about groups of people. |
|
Gender-Neutral Pronouns |
Unlike gendered language, gender-neutral language can apply to anyone. |
|
People-First Language |
Disability doesn’t make up the entirety of a person’s identity. People-first language puts the person before the disability, disorder, or diagnosis. |
|
Inclusive Representation |
Following some simple writing guidelines, like capitalizing groups, or avoiding certain idioms, can have a big impact on your content. |
|
Accessibility |
There isn't one way to read digital content. Accessibility helps make sure that people can also read your content via a screen reader. |
If your organization uses specific terms with inclusive language, you can link this custom terminology to your Inclusive Language goal. Acrolinx will then highlight any terms that you add as Inclusive Language issues. The highlighted terms will also count toward the Inclusive Language goal in Acrolinx Analytics.
Some of the guidelines for Inclusive Language are connected to certain word lists. Your terms will be added to these lists. That's because your preferred terms will always take priority, and they might override some Acrolinx standard Inclusive Language guidelines.
Say that your company defines some inclusive alternatives to non-inclusive terms. Instead of the non-inclusive “blacklist”, for example, you want to use something like blocklist, denylist, reject list, or exclude list. To set one of these inclusive terms as an alternative for your writers, add it to your terminology as a preferred term. That way, Acrolinx will suggest your preferred term.
As a first step, add your inclusive language terms and create domains or a term filter in the Terminology section of the Dashboard. You can then select the domains or term filter you want to share with style guides.
Tip
To learn how you share a term filter with style guides, see Open and Share Term Filters.
After that, the shared domains or term filter are available in Custom Inclusive Language Terms.
To add domains or a term filter to Inclusive Language, follow these steps:
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Navigate to company style and style guides, click the name of the style guide you want to edit.
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Click on the goal Inclusive Language to expand it.
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Expand the guideline group Custom Inclusive Language Terms.
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Choose whether you want to use terminology from domains or a term filter.
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Domains - select one or more domains from the dropdown.
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Term filter - select one term filter from the dropdown.
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Click SAVE.
Warning
To make these changes, you'll need to reload the corresponding language configuration. After your save, a dialog box will open to ask if you want to RELOAD NOW or RELOAD LATER. To reload the language configuration immediately, simply click RELOAD NOW. If you plan to work on more style guides, it might make sense to reload the language configuration after you've made all of the planned changes. In this case, click RELOAD LATER. Keep in mind that the changes will only apply after a reload. You can reload the language configuration in the Reload language servers section.
You can also configure the scoring of so-called admitted terms. You can decide if terms with the status "admitted" contribute to the Acrolinx Score. Select the radio button next to "Required" for them to count toward the score. If you choose "Recommended," Acrolinx will highlight them but they won’t affect the score. Don't forget to click SAVE.
You can find more information about the admitted status in Add Term Statuses, Head Terms, or Domains.