Welcome to the ACS Inclusivity Style Guide

In November 2017, I was taken aback when I saw a C&EN headline that read, “Proteomics goes native.” As a science writer and editor with a PhD in biochemistry, I knew the article would be about an important advance in proteomics research. But as someone with roots in India, I understood the phrase “goes native” was derogatory to Brown and Black people of color who lived under colonialism. The headline caused hurt when the intention was lighthearted wordplay.

When I became the leader of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Respect (DEIR) in spring 2021, the first thing I wanted the office to do was tap into the power of words. If the American Chemical Society were going to succeed with its strategic goal to embrace and advance inclusion in chemistry, we needed to first start with language.

Enter the idea of creating an ACS Inclusivity Style Guide. I was inspired by the C&EN Style Guide, an internal document that I heavily relied on for bias-free language during my tenure at the magazine. Using the C&EN Style Guide as the framework, ACS launched the ACS Inclusivity Style Guide was born by the end of 2021. The free online resource was, and continues to be, created by a cross-functional team of writers, editors, web designers, and DEIR experts from across ACS staff.

The guide can be consulted to ensure you use welcoming language and images for everyone within your intended audience.—whether you’re creating writing emails, memos, articles, surveys, or other types of materials. We have received feedback saying that the ACS Inclusivity Style Guide poses as the language police, but it is literally what it says it is: a guide. You can choose to use it or not.

The guide is regularly updated to respond to evolutions in language in a timely fashion. It focuses on USAmerican English, and I hope that it inspires speakers of different languages to create similar resources. The whole ACS Inclusivity Style Guide can be found at www.acs.org/inclusivityguide.

Tip sheets, which accompany the guide, are being highlighted in C&EN in this special series. These tip sheets pull advice from evergreen portions of the guide. An introduction and two tip sheets will be available in this issue and in the next five issues of C&EN. If you can’t wait that long for the full collection, you can find all of the tip sheets incan be found under the “Related resources” section tab in the online guide.

The tip sheets in this installment focus on general language guidelines as well as creating inclusive narratives, framesing, and sentence structures. You’ll learn how to avoid reducing people to one characteristic and find some examples of how to use active phrasing so it’s clear who is doing the action on whom.

If you have feedback about the guide, please email ISG@acs.org. If you have suggestions for other types of resources that will help you create an inclusive and welcoming environment for you and others around you, please email the Office of DEIR at diversity@acs.org.

Rajendrani “(Raj”) Mukhopadhyay is the senior vice president of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Respect at the American Chemical Society.