Communicating with Inclusivity in Mind
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The words and themes you choose can impact your audience in many ways.
While writing our book Captovation: Online Presentations by Design, we were reminded of this by Micki Byrnes, President & General Manager at WKYC-TV, as she described her experience with a session she attended: “The presentation was definitely male-oriented, and the speaker’s background was sports or whatever. And he talked like he was talking to a locker room full of football players. I was taken aback by how over-the-top he was.” In this instance, Micki indicates that the speaker did not fully consider everyone who might be in his audience and thus constructed a presentation and spoke in a tone directed only toward one sector of the audience—thus alienating the rest of the listeners. To demonstrate that you have every audience member in mind, we reinforce our assertion that it’s critical to be intentional about your themes, visuals, and choice of words because they can unite, enthuse, and inspire—or divide, discourage, and exclude. Thus, you must choose your words with care and be as intentionally inclusive as possible.
In addition to many of the slang or racial slurs (both outdated and those still used today) that are inappropriate and unprofessional for formal presentations, some phrases should be avoided. In the United States, common phrases like “peanut gallery,” “no can do,” “grandfather clause,” “low man on the totem pole,” “hip hip hooray,” and “Irish goodbye” are quite common in everyday communication; however, you may be surprised to learn that each has negative historical connotations. In addition, gender bias is quite common in our language. For instance, words like “mailman,” “salesman,” “policeman”, and “manpower” should be replaced with “mail carrier,” “salesperson,” “police officer,” and “workforce.” Likewise, remember that pronouns are no longer simply “he/him/his,” “she/her/hers,” or “they/them/theirs.” Some presenters may choose to include their preferred pronouns in their introduction or on their opening slide. Some organizations take inclusivity very seriously and include it as part of their core values; you might find clues about this when researching the organization or during your design phase conversations with the leaders and employees.
Finally, we recommend using “person-first language” if you are referring to differently-abled persons. So instead of “the autistic man,” you could say “the person on the autism spectrum.” Person-first language is recommended because it preserves the identity of the person themself, instead of labeling them by their disability. If you would like to read or learn more about how to speak about persons with disabilities, we recommend the work of Allison Hitt, a writing professor, and disability advocate.
Hopefully, this quick (but important) post provides you with a few considerations that help you avoid words and phrases that reflect poorly on you as a presenter. We suggest exploring the podcast episode Words Matter: How to Make Your Communication Inclusive from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University to learn more.
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We explore this topic and others in our new book Captovation: Online Presentations by Design.