news – MEMORANDUM

Professional Writers Wield Power on Society

By Hunter Freeman

digital illustration — Media is influencing our lives more than ever before

Professional writers have the ability to destroy the world—hard stop.

The Status Quo

Every day, people make decisions based on available information usually sourced from the Internet or social media. Most of the time, these decisions are insignificant: Should you wear a jacket? What drink should you buy at Starbucks? On the grand scale, taking a left to avoid traffic will not detonate the Earth.

Contemporary professional writers play the role of the information middleman. Businesses and organizations hire them as a buffer between the institution and the audience: to perform upkeep on public appearances, to report the demands of the people, to rally the forces against opposition.

More and more, professional writers are assigned to positions in the public sphere as social media managers, technical communicators, and content editors. At the same time, society is increasingly turning to social media and the Internet for news and information it can depend on.

This is to say, the work professional writers do affects public opinions more than ever. Professional writers choose what is displayed on the platforms that people are turning to for information.

The Shift in Responsibility

But what happens when society’s information platforms (Facebook, Twitter, websites) are corruptible? Fake political ad campaigns plagued Facebook and Twitter in the 2016 presidential election. It is still up for debate (at the time of writing this) how much the manipulation affected the results, but it certainly played a role in the election.

The argument is not that professional writers can’t handle the task. Writers are uniquely trained to create messages: they consider the audience, fact check the data and correct mistakes. But the adage about great power will become a central operating philosophy for professional writers of the future.

In a scenario that would make George Orwell cringe, professional writers will determine what the public sees. They choose what information is displayed on a landing page. They assign a hierarchical importance to data. They shape your opinions. They influence your thoughts.

The job is changing with the landscape. With the advent of information technology, messages and videos now go viral, potentially reaching millions of people in a few hours. Wordsmiths will have to be more careful with the messages they create. The same skills that make a person a capable professional writer are the same that can wreak havoc on the public.

By selecting information responsibly and considering the impact of words, professional writing will become a new occupation in civic service. Borrowing from the words of Senator Richard Burr, professional writers will stand as our first line of defense from the damage that words can do.

A Word For All: Ethics, Usability and the Singular “They”

greeting sign with they/them/theirs pronouns — Inclusivity in professional writing

By Em Wiginton

In professional writing, audience dictates the language, form and content of every document. These considerations often bring up questions of ethics: how do we create the most usable, inclusive document for a certain set of people, and how can we make sure we are intertextually humanizing our readers?

At the intersection of ethics and usability in professional writing lies the issue of audience and gender—and more specifically, use of the singular “they.”

Much of the time, we use the singular “they” without even thinking about it—“Someone left their phone in class,” for example—but it has still met criticism based on the belief that it can only be used as a plural pronoun. Even my high school English teachers insisted that we use “he or she” in our academic papers, but where style and larger conversations about gender intersect, these standards are changing.

“They” and Ethics

Recent discourse has brought into question whether or not “they” can be used as a singular pronoun. However, as understanding about gender and inclusivity evolves, the use of “they” has become the best way of making sure you’re referring to everyone in your audience.

This made news in December 2015 when the Washington Post cited the singular they as the solution to the gender problem in writing. “They” includes every gender in a given audience, but also validates the existence of gender-neutral individuals, who may prefer “they” as their pronoun of choice.

“They” and Usability

The singular “they” is also the best option in terms of form. The APA Style Blog, which is the user-created counterpart to the style guide that many professional writers adhere to, suggests “they” instead of s/he, (s)he, he/she, or alternating use between he and she, as these can be awkward and distracting to the reader. The AP Stylebook has officially accepted the singular they, but the APA Style Guide has yet to change its standards on its use.

The Future of “They”

The failure of style guides to catch up with conversations about inclusivity and ethics raises an interesting dilemma: What exactly are writers to do when it comes to gender and audience?

Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness discusses how “biases can creep in when similarity and frequency diverge.” In other words, it can be easy to lump people into stereotypes and use non-inclusive wording, especially when style has yet to encourage otherwise. However, professional writing is, above all, a humanistic genre—one in which we must be activists and advocates for our users.

In all issues of audience gender, class, race and ableness, our writing should always be inclusive of and be usable by everyone.