How to Choose Inclusive Terminology in Academic Writing

At some point in your career as a researcher—especially if your work pertains to social justice—you'll hit a moment where you question your use of a word or phrasing. Maybe you've used it multiple times before, but now it suddenly feels wrong in light of something you've read. Or, maybe a participant corrects you. Maybe a reviewer flags it. Maybe you just notice that the term you learned in undergrad has been challenged by the very community you're writing about. Let me start by saying: it's wonderful that you've taken notice and paused to think through your practices.

This being said, it may come as a disappointment to those looking for a quick fix answer regarding how to write inclusively for an academic audience that the ethical use of terminology and conceptual framing to describe populations subject to, for example, historical inequality, requires a genuine, sustained investment over time.

Inclusive terminology is so much more than a box to check before you submit your research for evaluation by your peers; it's about showing care and consideration in your writing and upholding the humanity of the people or places your research is about.

If writing inclusively has felt like something you're just supposed to know as a social justice researcher, here's some guidance on where to start. By the end, you'll see that making inclusive decisions comes down to listening, asking questions, and making your own informed justifications for the terminology you use.

Start with the People, Not the Style Guide

It's tempting to treat terminology as a lookup problem—find the "correct" term, insert it, and move on. But language about identity and lived experience is contested precisely because it belongs to the people it describes, whose existence is independent of academic research or institutions, even if they sometimes intersect. The most reliable source for how a community wants to be named is the community itself.

This means your terminology choices should be informed by current, community-authored sources: advocacy organizations, community-produced style guides, first-person writing, and—where possible—direct input from the people you're studying. If you belong to the people you're studying, you want to be clear that your choice of language not only represents yourself, but also the community in which you feel you belong. There is no shortcut or style guide that will unanimously state what the specific group you're working with prefers—you must do the work to read around and ask questions to reach a consensus.

Expect Terminology to Change—Because the People Behind It Are Not Static

Language shifts because the communities using it are alive, organizing, and renegotiating how they want to be seen. Terms that were standard in journals a decade ago may now read as clinical, othering, or outdated. Identity language evolves in real time, often faster than academic publishing can keep pace with, which means you must stay abreast of ongoing debates outside of academic spaces.

Practically, this means a terminology choice you made at the start of a multi-year project may need revisiting before you publish. Build a habit of checking in periodically, not just at the outset. A ten-minute search of recent community writing or advocacy organization pages before a major submission can save you from publishing language that's already aged out. For longer projects, create a living style sheet with key terminology and definitions that you can return to over time.

Watch for Deficit Framing Hiding Inside "Neutral" Words

Some of the most exclusionary language in academic writing doesn't look like a slur—it looks like objective, clinical description. Phrases like "at-risk," "vulnerable population," "culturally deprived," or "disadvantaged" can unintentionally frame people as inherently lacking, rather than as people navigating structures that systemically disadvantage them. The distinction is important: one framing locates the problem in the person, the other locates it in the system. You'll want to think carefully about the impact adopting seemingly ubiquitous terms can have on your project and the way it is read.

A useful check: read your description back and ask whether it centers what's happening to someone, or what's wrong with someone. "Communities affected by underinvestment in public housing" tells a different story than "disadvantaged communities," even though both might describe the same group. Another powerful example: "slaves" versus "enslaved peoples." As my mentor described it to me during my graduate training, "slavery is a forced condition (i.e., something that is happening to someone), not a being."

Be as Specific as the Data Allows

Umbrella terms—"Asian," "Latino/a/x," "LGBTQ+," "disabled"—are sometimes necessary for readability, but they can also flatten enormous internal diversity in ways that obscure your findings. If your dataset allows it, embrace specificity, or better yet, intersectionality wherever you can. This is not only the more rigorous, but also the more respectful, choice. "Hmong and Vietnamese American respondents" tells your reader more and represents your participants more accurately than "Asian American respondents" alone. Equally, "middle-class African American women" gives us much more information than "Black women."

This is also where inclusive language and methodological rigor positively reinforce each other: vague identity categories often mean vague analysis. Precision in language frequently pushes you toward precision in your data, too. In other words, specific and intentional terminology will be reflected in the frame through which you analyze your research subjects (e.g., taking into account race, class, gender, sexuality, geographical location, immigration status, etc.). On the other hand, if you intentionally adopt an umbrella term precisely for reasons of inclusivity, then state that to your reader—let them know you're thinking carefully about the implications of your language.

Handle Contested or Reclaimed Terms with Care and Full Discussion

As stated, some terms are being actively reclaimed by the communities they once harmed; others remain genuinely contested within a community, with no consensus even among members. Both situations call for transparency rather than silence. If you're using a reclaimed term, note who uses it and in what context—reclaimed language used by community members among themselves doesn't always (and sometimes shouldn't) transfer to outside researchers' writing. If a term is contested, it's fair (and often expected) to name that contestation explicitly and discuss it rather than picking a side and not presenting the contestation.

Include a brief methodological note to be transparent with your reader about your thinking. "I use the term X throughout, following the terminology preferred by [organization/source], while acknowledging that usage varies within this community. For example, [organization/source] prefers X, reasoning that...," is genuinely helpful to a reader, whether they're a peer reviewer or a dissertation chair. It shows whoever your reader is that you made an informed, careful choice rather than a default or haphazard one.

Build Terminology Checks into Your Research Timeline, Not Just Your Final Edit

Terminology should inform and shape your project from its inception. If you wait until the final proofread to think about it, you'll be making rushed decisions under deadline pressure—exactly the conditions under which careless language slips through. Instead, treat terminology as part of your research design: address it when you write your interview protocols and consent forms, for example, then revisit it when you draft your literature review, and check it again before submission. Language choices made early tend to ripple through months of writing, so catching them early saves you from a painful find-and-replace across an entire manuscript later. More than this, it gives you the opportunity to think and rethink language's implications over time.

True story: I changed a keyword in my doctoral dissertation's title just a couple of months before submitting it—it took this long for me to recognize that the former term just wasn't appropriate anymore in light of the direction my research took.

It's also worth having someone else look at this specifically—an advisor, a colleague from the community you're studying, a sensitivity reader, or perhaps an editor like myself—rather than trusting your own blind spots to catch everything.

A Few Practical Habits Worth Adopting

Keep a running terminology log (a "living" style sheet) for long projects, noting the term you chose, your source, your reasoning, and the date—so you can revisit and update it as usage shifts.

When style guides disagree (APA, discipline-specific guides, community-authored guides), default to the most recent community-authored source, or the one that most directly aligns with your ethical compass and that of your project. Whatever you go with, note your reasoning.

Avoid euphemisms as a substitute for naming difficult truths. Softening language to avoid discomfort often ends up avoiding the actual finding.

When in doubt, ask. A short, respectful email to an advocacy organization or a note in your interview protocol asking participants for their preferred terms costs little and prevents a great deal of harm. This effort to decenter yourself as the researcher who purportedly has all the answers also importantly contributes to community-centered pedagogy and works against the logics of extraction that have dominated relationships between institutions and their surrounding communities for many years.

Conclusion

Terminology work is never fully finished—not because you're doing it wrong, but because it's tethered to ideas and people who are constantly evolving. The important takeaway here is that you don't need to focus on committing to memory an annotated bibliography of all the key terms your research is contending with. Rather, you need to focus on developing an inclusive sensibility within yourself (i.e., staying curious, staying humble, and treating the people in your research as the authority on their own lives). That demeanor will serve you far longer than any style guide.

If you're working through these choices in your own writing—whether it's a single contested term or a full framework for how your dissertation talks about the communities you study—I'd love to help you think it through as your editor. You can send me a message or book a call here.