The American Copy Editors Society, the organization now known as ACES: The Society for Editing, has strayed far from its mission since being founded in the late 1990s. Recently it hosted a conference at which the head of the Associated Press Stylebook announced that the venerable reference tool for journalists was adding a new chapter on “inclusive storytelling.” The head of the AP Stylebook told ACES in an interview after the conference that “inclusive storytelling must involve people at every stage and every level of a story, bringing in as many perspectives as possible.”
After all, who else but someone trained in this obsequious newspeak of “inclusion” as taught in exclusive colleges could come up with wisdom as profound as this, from the new AP Stylebook inclusive storytelling guidance: “The words — even a single word — that we choose to describe a person or convey a scene shape the thoughts and perceptions of readers and listeners. … Is a person an addict, or a person with a drug dependency? Is the woman elderly, or a 70-year-old marathon runner?”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, I would argue, an elderly woman when, in 2017, Politico reporter Ben Shreckinger wrote the piece titled “I Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Workout. It Nearly Broke Me.” She was even more elderly when Elana Lyn Gross wrote in Business Insider in 2019 that “Ginsburg is not defined by her 86 years of age. She works out with her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, twice a week for an hour.”
Is “elderly” sometimes a rude word since it references the mortal fact that a person is likely approaching death? Is it uncouth? Could you imagine it “excluding” someone in the sense that it might wound the feelings of a person of advanced age more than an alternate word choice? Yes, absolutely. But that’s a matter of writerly intention, and of honesty, no matter for a style guide.
“The work on the 2022 edition of the AP Stylebook was driven by the news of the past few years,” its editor told ACES, news that “has been particularly big and broad, especially on issues related to gender, race, the pandemic, and politics,” she said. This, perhaps, is why the guide has gotten so shoddy. Along with guidance to stop discussing the species “gypsy moth” in lieu of “spongy moths,” take the new entry on “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” Apparently, this is a “movement to draw attention to disproportionate violence against Indigenous people, particularly women and children, and the lack of data in law enforcement agencies.” The AP Stylebook also notes that we should “on second reference use the movement, not MMIW.”
This movement does exist, and given the poverty on reservations and the many ways law works less effectively in Native American communities, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that the “lack of data in enforcement agencies” would, if we could find the missing data, show that there is disproportionate violence against Native women. But it is fundamentally not journalistic to make an assertion in one part of a sentence and then acknowledge that there is no evidence for the assertion in the other. And that’s just for the reporters of the field. For the copy editors and the style guiders, it’s amazing how far afield they let themselves go, and what nonsense they let themselves talk, so long as they license it by calling themselves “inclusive” for doing it.
