Three Crucial Tips for Writing About
Your Participants

Even when your heart is in the right place, it is all too easy to write about the participants of your work in a way that subtly disempowers or dishonors them. Here are three important considerations to make sure you avoid this faux pas.

1. Compassion – Not Judgment

It is important to honor, respect, and show compassion for wherever a participant is in life at the moment. Be careful to avoid words that carry either implicit or explicit judgment.

Examples:

	“We help people get their lives in order and get decent jobs.”
	“We help people who need guidance to discover what they want in life and pursue suitable careers.”

The first example below contains implicit judgment, while the second contains implicit compassion.

Whenever you are writing about your participants, look for any words or phrases that anyone might interpret as showing them in a negative light, and revise to show compassion for where they are in life instead of judgment of them for being there. This concept applies to everyone, from teachers and nurses to people just getting out of jail and people struggling with addiction. Judging people for their struggles paints them as worthless and subtly strips them of their humanity.

 

2. Capacity for Change – Not Weakness

Be careful not to say anything that implies that your participants need your help because they are intrinsically incapable or weak; this is another way of disrespecting their worth. Instead, focus on their intrinsic capacity for learning, growing, healing, coping, or whatever else is appropriate.

Examples:

	“We help unskilled people who are hard-to-employ because they lack the discipline to sustain jobs.”
	“We help people find their personal motivation and develop the skills and discipline to sustain jobs.”

The first example paints the participants as intrinsically lacking and does not show any possibility of change or growth. The second focuses on participants’ ability to learn and grow and talks about motivation as something that they need to find within themselves, rather than something that they lack.

Check your writing to make it sure it implies that participants are capable. Even if you are talking about people who can’t learn something, such as people who are intellectually disabled, focus on what they can do, how they can grow, and what they have to offer other people or the community as a whole.

 

3. Active – Not Passive

Make sure to show your participants as actively working with you, not passively receiving from you. If you don’t present them as living human beings actively making their own choices, doing the work they need to do, and creating self-determined lives, they will appear as passive, empty buckets needing you to fill them.

Example:

	“We empower unskilled people by giving them job training.”
	“We give people the opportunity to empower themselves by learning job skills.”

In the first example, the participants don’t actually do anything; they might as well be sitting there blinking while job skills are handed to them on a silver platter and empowerment is sprinkled over them like a magic powder.  In the second example, however, it is clear that all the organization can do is open doors and offer opportunities; it is up to the participants to empower themselves by choosing to try and doing the hard work it takes to make something of those opportunities.

Even if participants are passive while receiving your work – like if they are literally lying down with their eyes closed while you give them a massage – they are still active in seeking you out and making the choice to receive from you.

 

If you don’t show your participants as implicitly deserving compassion, capable, and active, you run the risk of alienating or offending people, unwittingly perpetuating negative stereotypes, or simply missing out on opportunities that are given to someone else instead. If you do present your participants this way, it will help you attract more participants, donors, funders, and volunteers. Writing in this way also contributes to building an organizational culture and a wider culture that truly honor all people.