In Unit 6, you set up your chapter doc with structured headers, pasted in openly licensed content, and practiced Universal Design for Learning strategies to adapt open content for your chapter. You’ll likely continue to find, reuse, and revise open content from your background scan as you go along, but in this unit we’re going to discuss strategies to draft original content with an equity lens.

As we discussed in Unit 1, the term “equity lens” is a metaphor that has been critiqued because a lens can be put on or taken off. In the context of this project, we acknowledge that a lens is impermanent, and recognize that participants engage in a continuous practice to keep looking at your curriculum design through the lens. The sections below offer strategies to help you write with your equity lens in place. They align with two of the equity-minded instructional design approaches we introduced in the matrix we shared in Unit 1: Transparency in Learning and Teaching, and Culturally Responsive Teaching.

Inclusive writing aligns with the overall equity approach of the Open Curriculum Project. Our equity statement commits to:

1. Ensure diversity of representation within our team and the materials we distribute.
2. Publish materials that use accessible, clear language for our target audience.
3. Share course materials that directly address and interrogate systems of oppression, equipping students and educators with the knowledge to do the same.

Authors have an essential role in keeping these commitments. Think back to the Equity Statement Reflection in Unit 2 that invited you to consider how the project’s equity statement relates to your own investments and goals as an educator. Since you began this project, what has shifted for you? What do you bring into your first chapter draft that you didn’t know before? Continuing to reflect on your writing choices will ensure a book that is readable for a wide range of learners.

Set Inclusive Writing Priorities

Inclusive writing involves an intentional effort on the part of the writer to eliminate bias, assumptions, stereotypes, and barriers to understanding. Language is a product of culture and reflects the culture’s systems of power and oppression. But language can also shape thought and promote change. Conscious and deliberate choices in the words we use can counter the ingrained biases that affect the way we think about and see the world. We will continue to reflect on inclusive style through the writing and revision process in order to support our Learner Focus criteria for success: Chapter is written clearly and uses inclusive language.

The sections below list important priorities for inclusive writing. They are priorities because most textbooks are written without attention to present and historic harms that affect the students in our classrooms. The bulleted lists provide pointers that help the books in our project avoid reproducing those harms.

You can practice an inclusive writing mindset by paying attention to places where you:

• Use language that describes people
• Use language that includes, excludes, or “others”
• Use language that sidesteps, downplays, or glosses over historical and systemic inequities.

You have already started a word list in your {Course #} About This Book document. As you practice inclusive writing, you will add to your word list so that you capture the decisions your team makes and use inclusive writing consistently across chapters.

The following practices can help you hold an inclusive writing mindset.

When language describes people

• Pause, reflect, and check the Word List in your {Course #} About This Book document when you are writing about race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, economic status, or other identities that have been historically minoritized.
• Use person-first language. For example, use “a person with mental illness,” not “a mentally ill person” or “the mentally ill.” For more examples, visit Person-Centered Language [Website].
• Be mindful of adjectives and adverbs that imply judgment or bias or that are inconsistently applied to different groups.
• Use self-identified names and pronouns.

When language includes, excludes, or “others”

• Notice if you use the “editorial” or “royal” we; instead, define who is included in this group (“we the authors” or “we as students and practitioners in this discipline”).
• Be mindful of assumptions about what the reader knows, believes, or has experienced.
• Avoid deficit-based descriptions of people and their life experiences.

When language sidesteps, downplays, or glosses over historical and systemic inequities

• Recognize that language is never neutral and is rooted in power structures.
• Acknowledge differences.
• Call out oppression.
• Use the active voice to make it clear who is doing what in a sentence.
• Be mindful of rhetorical questions that allow for misleading conclusions.

Inclusive Writing Strategies

The sections below take a deeper look into exactly how you can apply four inclusive writing strategies to your chapter draft: specificity, precision, accountability, and humanity. Use these strategies to address the priorities listed in the section above.

Don’t worry about getting everything perfect right away because there are many opportunities for review and revision before students will use your chapter. For now, we want you to start thinking about inclusive writing but we don’t want you to let wordsmithing slow you down.

Specificity

Macro level: give specific names, background, and context to ideas rather than assuming familiarity.

Example:

Instead of a statement like “Many people in society experience inequality,” spend more time teasing out the specifics: “Social inequality is a pervasive issue in contemporary U.S. society. According to recent studies, income inequality has been increasing steadily over the past several decades, with the top 1% of earners holding an increasingly large share of the country’s wealth. Additionally, racial and gender disparities in access to education, healthcare, and job opportunities continue to persist, leading to unequal outcomes for individuals from marginalized communities. These patterns of inequality can have far-reaching consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.” In this revised statement, the author has specified the type of inequality they are referring to (social inequality), provided evidence to support the claim, and identified the potential consequences of this inequality.

Micro level: use specific, concrete examples to bring abstract ideas to life.

Example:

Describe what concepts look like or feel like to make them more concrete (perceivable through the five senses). Use “for example” or “for instance” to help students connect the new idea to something they’re already familiar with: “Racial categories are unstable and constantly changing in response to social and historical contexts (Omi and Winant 1994). For example, the U.S. Census listed three racial categories in 1860 and five in 2020.”

Precision

Macro level: drafting for precision means focusing on what matters and getting rid of anything extraneous. A common barrier to student understanding is not knowing what’s important or what to focus on.

Example:

The cardinal rule of drafting for precision can be summed up in this quote by William Zinsser from On Writing Well: “Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.”

Micro level: define essential terminology so readers have a precise, shared understanding of important concepts.

Example:

This example shows how to define specialized language for a general audience: “The property that a person leaves behind when they die is called the decedent’s estate. The decedent is the person who died. Their estate is the property they owned when they died.”

Accountability

Macro level: acknowledge and take responsibility for the ways your discipline has contributed to systems of power and oppression that have resulted in the marginalization of people.

Example:

“The American Psychological Association failed in its role leading the discipline of psychology, was complicit in contributing to systemic inequities, and hurt many through racism, racial discrimination, and denigration of people of color, thereby falling short on its mission to benefit society and improve lives. APA is profoundly sorry, accepts responsibility for, and owns the actions and inactions of APA itself, the discipline of psychology, and individual psychologists who stood as leaders for the organization and field.”

Micro level: ensure your sentences are active and direct so it is clear who is responsible for the action.

Example:

In this example, the passive voice does not acknowledge the actor in the sentence: “Slaves were considered property.” Instead, try revising so the actor is visible in the sentence: “Enslavers treated captive Africans as property.”

Humanity

Macro level: feature scholars from marginalized communities and connect concepts to readers’ lived experiences.

Example:

Featuring scholars from marginalized communities means placing them on equal footing with the “founding fathers” of your discipline.

Micro level: use student-centered, person-first, or identity-first language.

Example:

Address the reader as “you.” Provide examples that include people. Avoid phrases like “addict” or “mentally ill” that reduce people to a label. Instead, use language that puts people first, such as “a person with a substance use disorder,” or “a person with a mental illness.”

Advice on Plain Language

When it comes to the basics of writing structures – paragraphs, sentences, clauses, and words – we recommend a plain language approach in order to minimize barriers to understanding. Remember that one of our Learner Focus criteria for success is to anticipate learner variability by writing for a student reading level (grades 8-12) rather than an academic audience. One of the most popular plain language myths is that you can’t cover complex content at this reading level. This myth is not true! As a subject-matter expert and teaching professional, you can translate complex ideas into content that is inclusive and readable.

Your students come to the text with different levels of reading proficiency. For many, English is not their first language. Reading online poses additional challenges for both attention and comprehension. Some concepts will, of course, require higher level vocabulary. You can make way for better understanding by linking these new ideas and terms to concepts your students are already familiar with.

Here are a few best practices for plain language:

• Break up long paragraphs and cover one topic per paragraph
• Express one idea per sentence, using active voice
• Untangle your sentence clauses by limiting use of semicolons, em dashes, “scare quotes,” and parenthetical phrases
• Choose the simplest word possible that is also precise.

The federal government has an excellent guide to writing in plain language. If you are looking for inspiration about writing mechanics, we recommend browsing through Federal plain language guidelines [Website].

Unit Self-Check Questions

Licenses and Attributions for Drafting with Equity in Mind

Open content, original

“Drafting with Equity in Mind” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Inclusive Writing Priorities” is adapted from “Inclusive Language Priorities” by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0.

“Inclusive Writing Strategies” is adapted from “Principles for Inclusive Revision” by Stephanie Lenox for Open Oregon Educational Resources, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

“Specificity Microlevel Example of Racial Categories” is from Racial, Ethnic, and Minority Groups by Jennifer Puentes and Nora Karena, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

“Advice on Writing Mechanics” is adapted from “Readability Comparison” by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0.

Figure Y1 7.2. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. Modified by Open Oregon Educational Resources with the addition of alt text.

References