Books read in May 2022

New:

 

1. The Nice and Accurate Good Omens TV Companion by Matt Whyman

2. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft

3. All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny

Reread:

1. Missing in Death

The generic "you" is a useful tool for writing inclusively

With reproductive health in the news lately, I'm seeing a lot of people diligently endeavouring to make their statements about bodies and anatomy as inclusive as possible, including inclusive of trans and non-binary people. This leads to phrases like "birthing parent" and "uterus-havers", which sound awkward, and can make the cause of inclusive language seem less credible to people who aren't already on side.

 

This makes me think of the 90s, when adults around me would often express contempt for inclusive language by performatively making it conspicuously unwieldy. "Firemen? No, wait, that isn't politically correct...firewomen? Firepeople??" Making a big noisy fuss of how inclusive language is OMG SO HARD while completely disregarding the perfectly cromulent word "firefighters". 

I think the attempts to use inclusive language for reproductive health might sometimes come across this way. 

 

In the specific case of recent inclusive reproductive health discourse, I can tell that the speakers' intentions are benign and they genuinely want to be inclusive. Sometimes they're deliberately aiming for conspicuousness, but sometimes they can't think of a less awkward way to phrase it, and the awkwardness might distract from or detract from their important point.

 

In these situations, where you want to be inclusive but can't think of a simple way to do so, a useful tool can be the generic "you".

 

Example:

Original: "Masks are mandatory in our birth centre. Mothers can remove their masks while in labour."

Attempt to make it inclusive: "Masks are mandatory in our birth centre. Birthing parents can remove their masks while in labour."

With the generic "you": "Mask are mandatory in our birth centre. You can remove your mask while you are in labour."

This is clear. It's inconspicuous. And it's inclusive - by which I mean not just that it includes anyone who might be in labour and while not being a woman or a mother, but also it specifically includes the reader (and, thereby, includes everyone). 

 

One objection to gender-inclusive language that I hear, most often from cis women, is that they feel that excluded when women are not specifically mentioned. Using the generic "you" helps mitigate this by addressing the reader directly. How could you feel excluded if I'm talking directly to you?

 

Of course, there are cases where the right communication strategy is to be conspicuously inclusive, even if the phrasing is awkward. Sometimes the situation does in fact call for a big showy show of the fact that not everyone who gives birth is a woman.

And sometimes the right communication strategy is to be inconspicuously inclusive, to make it no big deal that someone who is not a woman might be giving birth. The generic "you" can help you do that.

Read Aloud

In my work life, MVP of all computer tools since my head injury is the Read Aloud function in Word. (Similar functions exist in other software, and comparable tools are also sometimes embedded in the OS or downloadable as apps.)

Since my head injury, I've had to work harder to focus visually, especially on text and especially on a screen. This makes the revision and editing parts of my job much harder! I can easily focus enough to read for comprehension, but the deeper level of focus required to catch the kinds of errors my brain usually autocorrects takes an enormous amount of work - and all too much of that work is going into buckling down and focusing, before I can even start putting effort and energy into the actual work of my job.

My saviour is Read Aloud. When it reads the text to me verbally, the kinds of errors my eyes and my brain usually gloss over come out sounding conspicuous and bizarre. Overly-French structures sound heavy and awkward, and basically anything that needs attention sounds jarring.

Because Read Aloud reads the text at a steady pace, I don't have to keep myself on task - the computer is doing it for me. Depending on the text and my eyesight, I might read along with the text on the screen, or I might look at the French while listening to the English to make sure every concept is present, or I might put a cold compress over my eyes or work on a vision therapy exercise.

Sometimes I correct errors as I go, sometimes I flag things for further attention with the Comments function. Then, once the readthrough is finished, I can put all my effort and energy into actually fixing the things I have flagged for attention, without it all having been drained on finding the things that need attention.

***

I've talked before about how audiobooks don't work for me because they go in one ear and out the other and I don't retain the story, so it seems super counterintuitive that Read Aloud would actually help with my revision and editing. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've come to the realization that this is because I have a lifetime of experience reading for information.

When I read with my eyes, my brain is actively working to glean and assimilate meaning from the text, so it overlooks straightforward typos like public/pubic. When I listen, I'm not using the same mechanism as I've used my whole life to glean and assimilate meaning, so my brain isn't working to make sense of the text, and therefore isn't "helping" it.

I once read a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which helps you learn to draw by using your right brain to see lines and shadows. You learn to think "This line needs to be at this specific angle", rather than the left-brained inclination to think "I am drawing a hand." You think about the structure of the subject rather than what the subject actually is.

 

Using Read Aloud for revision works similarly. It doesn't trigger the functions in my brain that try to make the text make sense, so I can focus on the structure, on whether anything is out of place.

 

This does mean that I don't retain the content when revising. It goes in one ear and out the other just like audiobooks. (If it's my own translation, I assimilated the content during the drafting phase. If it's someone else's translation, I won't retain it.) But that doesn't actually matter! I don't need to learn the content or remember the plot, I just need to make the text work. If I ever need the information, I can look it back up! And if, for some reason, I need to actually assimilate the information, I still have the option of reading with my eyes.

Grade 13

Recently in the news: a plan to bring back Grade 13.

 

We had Grade 13 (then called OAC, which stood for Ontario Academic Credit) when I was in high school, and what I found useful about it is it gave us an opportunity for greater independence within the high-school context.

 

About three quarters of Grade 13 students were 18 years old when the school year started in September, and everyone was 18 by the end of December. This is relevant because 18 is the age of majority, students over the age of 18 weren't subject to the same rules about care and custody (for lack of a better word - I think there's a specific term for this but it escapes me).

In practical terms, this meant that we could sign ourselves out of school rather than needing a note from our parents and we didn't need our parents to sign report cards or permission slips. In fact, our teachers were not legally allowed to meet with our parents without our permission!

 

OAC classes operated on the assumption that all their students were over 18. In practical terms, this meant that if the teacher was absent, class was cancelled rather than having a substitute teacher. There weren't any parent-teacher interviews. We were expected to manage our own education and our own time like adults.

 

At the same time, the societal expectation was that we were still high school students and our parents were still expected to care for and support us as such.

 

If a parent had kicked an 18-year-old high school student out of their home, other parents - even those who would have responded positively to kicking out an 18-year-old high-school graduate - would be just as appalled as if they had kicked out a 17-year-old

 

Young people who would have responded to a peer saying "I'm an 18-year-old first-year university student and I moved out of my parents' house!" with "Cool!" would have responded to "I'm an 18-year-old high-school student and I moved out of my parents' house!" with "Is everything okay?"

This meant that we were empowered like adults to manage our education and our time, without being expected to take on the full suite of adult responsibilities like paying bills and buying groceries and managing a household. It was a sort of training wheels for adulthood.

It also helped train our parents for our adulthood. Our educational structure moved away from parental permission or parental involvement even while we were living in our parents' homes, which prepared our parents for not having direct involvement in our post-secondary education - something that's even more important today when it's even more financially difficult for students and young adults to live independently from their parents!

 

I had an on-campus job in university when Ontario eliminated Grade 13, and I noticed an immediate difference in parental involvement when the first Grade 12 cohort arrived. Parents were contacting us directly or accompanying their kids in person even for mundane things like asking how to configure an email account, seemingly without any attempt by the student to do it independently. I was only a few years older, but that simply wasn't done in my cohort! 

So if they do end up re-introducing Grade 13, I hope they take into consideration that Grade 13 students are going to be legal adults, and create a system and structure that reflects that, rather than a system and structure that has young adults spending their first year as a legal adult being treated like a child.

***

Even though my own actual firsthand experience with Grade 13 is that it was positive and empowering (and even though my own actual firsthand experience is that I felt too young for university in my first year, even though I could handle it perfectly well), I think if I were a student who expected my high school only to go as far as Grade 12, I'd find it insulting that they want to keep me in high school and living with my parents for another year. 

 

Similarly, if I were an adult who had graduated high school after Grade 12, I'd feel insulted on behalf of the youth of today and tomorrow that they'd have their launch delayed another year. 

This is why it kind of surprises me that they'd put this in a platform with the presumed goal of winning votes for an election. I'd imagine there's a significant segment of the population who would see it as completely unnecessary and perhaps even verging on punitive - especially since it has always been possible for students to keep attending high school if they aren't able to graduate or get the courses they need in the allotted number of years (historically this has been called a "victory lap".)

***

A caveat: I've noticed in recent years that teens and young adults (or, at least, a big enough proportion of the teen and young adult voices that reach me for me to notice) seem to perceive being considered/thought of/treated like a child (as opposed to an adult) as more positive than I do. 

 

They seem to feel that if you're treated like a child, you're being protected and cared for. Meanwhile, my experience - even in retrospect - was that being treated like a child meant my agency being disregarded, with no increase in care or protection. (And often, in my experience, "care and protection" was the label given to disregarding my agency.)

 

So, because of this, it's possible that today's young people might not feel liberated by being treated like an adult as opposed to like a child.

However, I am also aware that adults all too often will read or hear something about Young People Today and use that to treat young people with less agency than they should. I can't tell whether I myself am falling into that trap.

So, as with all aspects of life, the important thing is to listen to the people actually involved - today's high school students and recent high school graduates.