Inclusive language review

What an inclusive language review is

An inclusive language review is a read through your copy looking for wording that tells part of your audience, usually without anyone intending it, that they are not the customer you had in mind. Gendered job titles. A default assumption about who is in the household, who holds the money, who lifts the heavy thing. Idioms that only land for people who grew up here. Examples that always picture the same buyer. Each of those quietly narrows the market for a page that cost money to produce.

It is a commercial review, not a political one. The question I ask of every line is whether it needlessly excludes somebody who would otherwise have bought. If a phrase loses you nobody, I leave it alone. If it is central to your trade and it is the word your customers use, it stays and the note says why.

It is not a rewrite and it is not a compliance exercise. I do not hand back copy that nobody would say aloud, and I do not replace your voice with a careful one. Where a fix would flatten a sentence worth keeping, I say so and offer the choice.

When you need one

When you are selling to a broader market than the one the copy was written for. A trade that has changed who buys from it. A business expanding out of one city into a province. A company whose customer list no longer looks like the people in its photographs.

It is also worth doing before a rebrand, a website rewrite or a recruitment push, because it is cheaper to fix a habit once than to fix it in forty new pages afterwards. Careers copy is where it usually pays for itself fastest: wording that filters out applicants you would have hired is expensive in a way that is easy to miss.

You do not need it if what worries you is difficulty rather than exclusion. A page nobody finishes is a job for readability editing. And if the underlying problem is that you do not actually know who your buyers are now, spend the money on audience research first and have this done afterwards, on copy aimed at the right people.

What gets looked at

Everything you give me, sentence by sentence, against the patterns that turn up most in small-business copy.

• Gendered defaults. Job titles that carry a gender when the role does not. “He” standing in for a customer, an engineer, a tradesperson or a decision-maker. “Manpower”, “chairman”, “salesman” where a neutral word exists and reads no worse.
• Assumptions about household. Copy that assumes a couple, a spouse of a particular kind, children, or one person who decides. Common in home services, financial services, insurance and travel, and it quietly excludes households it never meant to.
• Assumptions about ability. Instructions that assume a reader can see the screen, hear the video, stand at the counter or lift the box, and the casual metaphors that use disability as a synonym for failure.
• Assumptions about age and income. Copy that treats older customers as a problem to be handled, or assumes a budget, a smartphone, a car, a credit card or a permanent address.
• Idioms that do not travel. Sports metaphors, local references and expressions that are invisible to a reader who learned English elsewhere, and who understands everything in your copy except the joke.
• Examples and cast. The people in your scenarios, testimonials and captions. If every named example is the same kind of buyer, the reader who is not that buyer draws the obvious conclusion.

What you get

The marked-up document. Your copy with every flagged phrase highlighted in place, a suggested alternative beside it, and a one-line reason. Suggestions, not corrections: you accept or reject each one, and a few will be rejected on good grounds.

A short list of recurring habits. Usually one page, rarely more than two. Not the individual flags but the handful of patterns underneath them, in the order they cost you most, with the plain fix for each. Most businesses have four or five habits repeated across everything they publish, and fixing the habit is what stops the problem coming back in the next document.

That is the whole deliverable. No scoring, no grading, no report on how your business is doing. Two things, and a conversation about them if you want one.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Calgary kitchen and bathroom renovation company has 18 website pages, a 20-page brochure and a careers page. Its copy was written six years ago. The review flags 61 phrases and reduces them to five habits.

The homeowner is “he” on nine pages and the designer is “she” on six. Eleven passages assume a married couple with children, including a financing page that talks throughout about “you and your husband or wife”. The accessibility section of the bathroom page describes grab bars and a curbless shower as being “for the elderly”, which the owner agrees is not who buys them. Four hockey metaphors do no harm on the blog and are left. The careers page asks for someone “young and energetic” who can “lift 50 pounds all day”, and the owner, when asked, says neither is a real requirement of two of the three roles. The fixes take a fortnight of small edits, and the financing page and careers page are rewritten properly.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who you sell to now, who you would like to sell to, and whether anything in your trade's vocabulary has to stay as it is. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on how much copy there is, and whether it is one document or a whole site.
3. You send the copy. Documents in editable form, or a list of page addresses. Captions and image descriptions count, so send those too.
4. The review. One pass for phrasing, one for the cast of examples across the whole set. Three to seven working days for a document; a full website takes two weeks or so.
5. Delivery. The marked-up copy and the habits list, with half an hour to go through anything you want to argue about.

What it costs

An inclusive language review is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the volume varies from one brochure to a site of a hundred pages. The pricing page shows the four ways I work; this is usually bought as a small fixed-price piece alongside another edit. The price is agreed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

The habits list is the thing to act on, and the cheapest way to keep it working is to turn it into a one-page list of words to use and avoid that whoever writes next actually reads. With several people writing, those decisions belong in a style guide. And if your images tell a narrower story than your words do, the captions and image descriptions are the next place to look. This review is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.