PS501 Unit 2 Inclusive Writing Paper Example

Words on the Night Log: A PS501 Unit 2 Paper Revising a Detention Center Program Summary for Inclusive, Professional Writing

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS501: Foundations of Professional Psychology

Unit 2 Inclusive Academic Writing Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the detention center, the program summary and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Document and Its Audience

Two years ago I wrote a one-page summary of the evening reading program at our detention center so that the county board could decide whether to keep funding it. The program pairs residents with volunteer readers from a community college for three evenings a week. The summary did its job, and the board renewed the program. Reading it again for this unit, I found it full of words I would not want a professor, a family member or a resident to read. This paper explains the revisions I made and why, so that the summary can go to the board again next spring in a form I can defend.

The audience matters to the choices. County board members are not psychologists, so the revision has to stay plain. Families of residents sometimes ask for program information, and residents themselves see posted materials. Academic writing in psychology asks for the same qualities this audience needs: precision, respect and no more detail about a person's characteristics than the point requires (American Psychological Association, 2020).

Principles Applied

The APA manual's bias-free language guidance rests on two ideas I tried to apply to every sentence. The first is to describe people at the right level of specificity, so that a characteristic appears only when it is relevant to what the sentence says. The second is to respect the labels people use for themselves and to avoid wording that reduces a person to a condition or a status (American Psychological Association, 2020).

Dunn and Andrews (2015) complicate the simple advice to always put the person first. Writing about disability, they trace how person-first wording became the APA default and how many disabled people and disability scholars came to prefer identity-first wording, which treats disability as part of who someone is rather than something to set apart. Their recommendation is that psychologists use both forms, guided by the preferences of the group being described. The lesson for my summary was not a rule to apply mechanically but a question to ask: what would the people described call themselves?

Labels Tied to Charges and Substances

The original summary used "juvenile delinquents" four times and "offenders" twice. These are legal and historical terms, and many of our residents have not been found responsible for anything; they are awaiting a court decision. Tran et al. (2018) argue that terms such as "offender" and "inmate" reduce a person to a status and can follow that person into health care and services. They recommend wording that names the person first and the situation second, built from four principles: involve people and respect their preferences, use accurate wording free of stigma, put the person ahead of the characteristic and stay aware of one's own habits of speech.

I replaced "juvenile delinquents" with "young people held at the center" or, where the legal status mattered, "youth awaiting adjudication." The second phrase is longer, but it is accurate, and accuracy was the problem with the original.

The original also described "the addicts in the program." Ashford et al. (2018) recruited 1,288 adults and tested terms for substance use with both a quick association task and a measure of social distance. Words such as "addict," "substance abuser" and "alcoholic" carried strong negative associations, while wording that put the person ahead of the disorder drew weaker negative associations. The sentence in my summary did not need the information at all. It was there to explain why some residents missed sessions for treatment groups, so I rewrote it to say that some residents attend health and treatment appointments during program hours.

The best revision of a stigmatizing label is often deletion, because the label was never doing any work in the sentence.

Other Revisions

Several smaller changes followed the same logic. "Mentally ill kids" became "residents with mental health needs," and only in the one sentence about how volunteers are trained to respond when a resident becomes upset. "Illegal immigrant families" described two residents whose parents had trouble visiting, but immigration status was irrelevant to the reading program, so the phrase came out. "Kids" became "young people" or "residents" throughout, because the summary went to a public body and the informal word read as dismissive. One sentence said a resident "suffers from dyslexia"; I asked the volunteer coordinator how the young person described it, learned the resident said "I'm dyslexic," and used that wording without the verb "suffers."

The volunteers were also described unevenly. Women volunteers were described by appearance ("a cheerful young woman") and men by role ("a retired teacher"). The revision describes every volunteer by role or by what they do in the program.

APA 7 Style Corrections

The original summary cited two sources in a footnote format and gave the program's results as "most kids improved." I converted the citations to APA 7 author-date style, added a reference list and replaced the vague claim with the figures we had: 31 of the 44 residents who attended at least six sessions in the last program year raised their reading level by at least one grade band on the center's placement test. I also added the comparison the board had never seen, which is that the placement test is given at intake and again at release, so the gains are measured over short and uneven stays. Numbers are written as numerals for 10 and above, and headings now follow APA levels instead of the bold capitals I used before.

What the Revision Changed

The revised summary is 41 words shorter than the original. Removing labels that did no work made sentences shorter, and replacing vague claims with numbers made them more exact. When I asked two night officers and the volunteer coordinator to read both versions, the coordinator said the new one sounded like it was written about people rather than a population. One officer thought "youth awaiting adjudication" was stiff, and I agreed to use it only where legal status mattered.

Limits of Rules

Inclusive language guidance changes, and preferences vary within groups. Dunn and Andrews (2015) make that point about disability, and Tran et al. (2018) build it into their first principle by asking writers to engage the people described. A paper like this cannot settle what every resident would prefer. What it can do is show the questions I now ask of a sentence: is this characteristic relevant, is the term accurate and would the person described recognize it?

Conclusion

Revising my own summary showed that inclusive writing and precise writing are mostly the same skill. The labels I removed were inaccurate, unnecessary or both, and the replacements made the document shorter and clearer for the board. The APA manual supplies the principles, and the research on disability, substance use and incarceration language shows that the choice of words affects how readers judge the people described.

References

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Ashford, R. D., Brown, A. M., & Curtis, B. (2018). Substance use, recovery, and linguistics: The impact of word choice on explicit and implicit bias. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 189, 131-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2018.05.005

Dunn, D. S., & Andrews, E. E. (2015). Person-first and identity-first language: Developing psychologists' cultural competence using disability language. American Psychologist, 70(3), 255-264. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038636

Tran, N. T., Baggio, S., Dawson, A., O'Moore, E., Williams, B., Bedell, P., Simon, O., Scholten, W., Getaz, L., & Wolff, H. (2018). Words matter: A call for humanizing and respectful language to describe people who experience incarceration. BMC International Health and Human Rights, 18, Article 41. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12914-018-0180-4