Voting
Choosing who holds an office, by marking a ballot on a set day.
Drifts toward: civic engagement, making your voice heard. Both are grander than the act and vaguer about what it does.
A writing guide
Some words make people stop listening before they have heard the argument. This guide explains why that happens, and what to write instead.
It covers language used in public argument: politics, civic life, safety, housing, the environment. It is a desk tool, not a position paper.
A reader who dislikes a word is usually not being unreasonable. The word has told them something, and often the word really is doing the thing they suspect.
There are four reasons this happens, and they are covered in the next section. Each one has a different repair, so the first job is always to work out which one you are dealing with.
One thing worth knowing before you start. It is tempting to build a list of banned words and safe replacements. Those lists go stale fast. Sustainability, resilience, stakeholder and wellbeing all began as ordinary technical terms and were treated as neutral for a while. Within about a decade each had been adopted by one camp and then rejected by the other. Any replacement list written today becomes a list of tomorrow's problem words.
What lasts is the concrete thing underneath the word. Nobody has a political reaction to a fire hydrant, a jury summons, or a bus that comes every twelve minutes. So this guide is built around tests you can apply to any word, rather than a list of words to avoid.
It also applies in both directions. Words fail on the left and on the right at roughly equal rates, and the examples here are drawn from both.
Take the word you are unsure about and run it through these in order. Stop at the first one that catches.
The word is accurate, but it tells the reader which group you belong to. They then argue with the group instead of the point. This is the most common failure and the easiest to fix, because the plain word almost always means the same thing.
Ask: would I still pick this word if I were writing for people who dislike me?
If no: swap in the ordinary word.
Instead ofWe need to centre the lived experience of marginalised folks.
WriteWe should ask the people who got turned away what happened to them.
Some words assume the argument is already won. A reader who has not been persuaded yet is right to refuse the word, because accepting it would mean accepting the point.
Ask: could someone agree with every fact I have given and still object to this word?
If yes: say the direction out loud, so it can be discussed.
Instead ofThis is a necessary step toward progress.
WriteThis would cut the wait from nine months to six.
Some words exist to make a hard thing easier to say. Readers notice the softening, and reasonably conclude that something is being managed rather than described. Every side does this with its own costs.
Ask: what would I say to the person this happened to?
If that is different: say that instead.
Instead ofFood insecurity affects one in six households here.
WriteOne household in six here cannot afford enough food.
Some words are used sincerely by everyone and mean different things to each. These cannot be swapped out, because there is no neutral substitute. The vagueness is hiding a real disagreement, and it will surface later anyway.
Ask: if two people who disagree had to point at the thing, would they point at the same object?
If no: keep the word, and add what you mean by it in the same sentence.
Instead ofThis is about public safety.
WriteThis is about break-ins on Elm Street, and whether more patrols would reduce them.
The first three are tidying. A careful writer clears them in one pass. The fourth is the real disagreement, and no choice of words will dissolve it. What you can do is stop people from mistaking a shared word for a shared position, which is where a lot of arguments go wrong before they start.
Type a word to get the test it fails and what to write instead. Words that are not listed fall through to the four questions. The whole list is in the next section.
Try
Every term in the guide, grouped by the test it fails, with the plain version underneath. Open any one for the reasoning.
Many arguments have two names for one object, one from each side. Below is the pair, and then the description both people would have to accept before they could argue properly.
Where the third line asks a question rather than giving a phrase, there is no neutral name available. The disagreement is genuine, and the wording was covering it up.
undocumented immigrant / illegal alien
a person living here without legal status
asylum seeker / bogus claimant
a person who has applied for protection and is waiting on a decision
newcomers / mass migration
how many people, arriving over how long
border security / militarising the border
how many officers, with what powers, at which crossings
safety net / handouts
which payment, how much, to whom
revenue tools / confiscation
tax collected under law, at this rate
corporate greed / job creators
which company, paying what wage, charging what price
living wage / wage mandate
an hourly rate set at this number
worker protections / red tape
which rule, costing how much, preventing what
public investment / government spending
money committed, and what it is expected to return
affordable housing / social housing
homes let at this rent, to people earning under this much
revitalisation / gentrification
who lived here before, who lives here now, at what rent
density / overdevelopment
this many homes per hectare, this many storeys
community concerns / blocking housing
who objected, to what, on what grounds
encampment / tent city
this many people sleeping outside in this park
public safety / law and order
which offence, which response, in which neighbourhood
police reform / defunding the police
this much budget moved from here to there
gun safety / gun rights
which weapons, which buyers, what checks
systemic barriers / personal responsibility
what he could control, and what he could not
climate crisis / climate alarmism
how much warming, by when, at what cost
clean energy transition / war on oil
this much capacity built, this much retired, by this year
carbon pricing / carbon tax
this much per tonne, collected here, returned there
preparedness / fearmongering
what could happen, how likely it is, what readiness would cost
misinformation / censorship
which claim, taken down by whom, on what grounds
content moderation / big tech overreach
which rule, applied to which post, by which company
hate speech / free expression
which words, said to whom, with what effect
fact-checking / gatekeeping
who checked which claim, against what source
reproductive rights / right to life
who decides, at what stage of a pregnancy
inclusive curriculum / indoctrination
which book, taught in which grade, saying what
diverse hiring / quotas
this many posts, filled how, from which pool of applicants
expertise / elitism
this person's training, and their record of being right
Here is what the method produces when applied to one subject. Each definition says what the thing is, in words that would survive being read aloud on a doorstep, followed by the abstractions it tends to drift toward.
Choosing who holds an office, by marking a ballot on a set day.
Drifts toward: civic engagement, making your voice heard. Both are grander than the act and vaguer about what it does.
Sitting with eleven strangers to decide whether the state has proved its case.
Drifts toward: participation in the justice system. That loses the eleven strangers, who are the whole point of it.
Money a government collects under law, to pay for things it has agreed to fund.
Loaded from both directions: contribution and investment on one side, confiscation and theft on the other. A neutral sentence exists and both sides step around it.
Repairing things that many people use, before they fail.
Drifts toward: infrastructure investment, stewardship, sustainability. Upkeep is older, shorter, and understood by anyone who has owned a roof.
Going to the meeting where the decision is actually made.
Drifts toward: mobilisation, organising, activism. Those name a side as well as an act.
The people whose houses touch yours.
Drifts toward: community, our community. Community has no edges, which is why it gets reached for and why it settles nothing.
Documents a government has to keep, and has to let people read.
Drifts toward: transparency, accountability. Those name a virtue. The record is a filing cabinet and a statute, and both can be checked.
Two people stating positions that cannot both be right, where others can hear both.
Drifts toward: dialogue, a national conversation. Those promise an outcome the act does not.