Writing sensitive content

I joined Nexer in 2022 and quickly came to love the culture and direction of the business. My colleagues here are open, hard-working people who genuinely care about the projects they’re working on. They want to make a difference to the people behind every service, content piece and interaction. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise that, within my first 3 weeks of working at Nexer, I was asked to write an inclusive language guide.

Together, Elizabeth Buie (a wonderful colleague of mine) and I began researching key topics and consulting team members with a range of life experiences.

When I got started with this task, I was nervous. I’m still nervous. For good reason, people care about the words we use and their meaning. And, being a white woman, with no access needs, I felt the need to really listen to others, to never assume, to research thoroughly, and to get this as imperfectly perfect as I could.

Research is key

If I feel nervous or vulnerable writing something, I know I need to understand more about it. Not so that I can dismiss any challenges to the content, or because my assumptions might be wrong (I expect them to be!), but so that I can make the best choices with the knowledge that I have available to me. I would rather know that I did my best to understand the complexities of a subject and got something wrong, than assume I know everything upfront.

To overcome this challenge, we:

• looked at other inclusive language guides available online
• read articles from those with lived experience
• attended online talks about inclusivity in the workplace
• spoke with our internal teams
• reached out to our Nexer Digital employee resource groups (groups formed by our employees that cover topics such as diversity, LGBTQ+ and accessibility)
• had open conversations about how the language would fit into our workplace and culture

This helped to build a much clearer picture of what we needed to write. We needed to open ourselves up to difficult conversations and use them to create positive change.

Get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable

As a content designer, I like working with facts. I might debate how we relay those facts to our audience, but I like knowing the steps needed to achieve a certain outcome. This takes some of the risk out of the content for the designer. We can design with the facts, to deliver the message in the best way we can.

Inclusive language is often very personal. What one person likes to use to describe themself, another may not. What is fact to someone, may not be for someone else. You will inevitably be writing about something that is not your own personal experience, and, quite frankly, that’s scary!

By the very nature of an inclusive language guide, you cannot be comfortable. It’s not like other work, not when vulnerability is so important to the content you’re writing.

I will admit I had a little stage fright about releasing this. I think the biggest hill I had to climb was to accept that we are going to get things wrong. And this is okay, as long as we listen to people’s concerns and accept that we’ll not get everything right.

Actively listen and adapt

You need to have difficult conversations. If someone with lived experience pushes back on something you have written, you need to hear them.

We’re often too scared to have conversations that leave us feeling vulnerable, especially in a work setting. But I truly believe that there is no progress without mistakes and open discussions around those mistakes. We need to listen with our hearts and learn with our minds to progress and deliver the best that we can.

The inclusive language guide is not a static document that we are throwing out there and leaving. It is ever evolving as we learn more and navigate through challenging times.

To find out more about our inclusive language guide, you can get in touch with Amy Czuba, Amy.Czuba@nexergroup.com.