Language and power names the recognition that writing conventions — what counts as “clear,” “professional,” or “correct” — are not neutral standards but products of specific histories, institutions, and power relations. This topic connects the writing module’s practical guidance to the pedagogy module’s decolonial and critical commitments.
The problem
The plain language movement argues that public communication should be understandable by the people it affects. This is a justice claim — access to information is a condition of exercising rights. But plain language specifications (including this vault’s) make choices about what language counts as plain, and those choices aren’t neutral.
“Plain” in practice often means Standard American English with short sentences, common vocabulary, and direct address. These conventions serve many readers well. But they also center a specific dialect, a specific set of rhetorical norms, and a specific relationship between writer and reader — one grounded in Anglophone institutional culture.
George Orwell recognized part of this in “Politics and the English Language” (1946): vague, bureaucratic prose conceals who does what to whom [@orwell1946]. But Orwell’s solution — clear, direct English — can itself become a tool of erasure when it requires speakers of other dialects, languages, or rhetorical traditions to conform to a single standard in order to be heard.
What this means for writing in this vault
The vault’s style guide and plain language specification operate within this tension. They set standards that make content usable for the default audience — and they should continue to do so. But several principles follow from taking language and power seriously:
The style guide is revisable, not authoritative
The vault’s conventions draw on specific scholarly traditions (see rhetoric and composition). Those traditions have their own epistemological commitments and blind spots. When the style guide says “prefer active voice,” it’s drawing on Joseph Williams’s research [@williams2006] — research conducted primarily on English-language academic and professional prose. The rule is useful within that context but is not a universal truth about good writing.
”Clarity” is relative to a discourse community
What counts as clear depends on who’s reading. A passage that’s opaque to one audience may be clear to another. The plain language specification’s default audience — “an adult reader with general literacy, no specialized background” — is a pragmatic choice, not an objective standard. Pages that declare a different audience (with an “Assumed audience” section) are not less clear — they’re clear for a different reader.
Scope honesty applies to writing conventions
The pedagogy module’s concept of scope honesty (from designing curricula) applies here: this vault’s writing conventions cover a specific register (Plain Technical General American English) for a specific context (a research vault in English). They don’t cover: writing in other languages, writing in non-standard dialects of English, oral and visual communication, or community-based knowledge practices that don’t take written form. Acknowledging these boundaries honestly is part of the vault’s intellectual integrity.
Documentation is a form of power
Deciding what to document, in what language, and in what form shapes what knowledge persists and what gets lost. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s critique of research as extraction applies to documentation practices too: writing about a community’s knowledge in a vault’s categories and conventions can be an act of appropriation if the community isn’t part of the process.
The vault acknowledges this through its discipline-neutral content principle — each module is written in the language natural to its discipline — and through the pedagogy module’s insistence that curricula state their scope honestly and name their exclusions.
Writing assessment as gatekeeping
Asao Inoue argues that writing assessment based on a single standard of “quality” — typically white, middle-class Standard American English — functions as a gate that disproportionately excludes writers from marginalized linguistic backgrounds. The standard isn’t neutral; it encodes specific racial and class formations [@inoue2015]. This applies beyond classrooms: any system that evaluates writing quality (style guides, editorial standards, documentation reviews) enforces a standard that privileges some linguistic backgrounds over others.
Technical communication as social justice
Natasha Jones extends these concerns to technical writing specifically: documentation practices carry assumptions about whose needs matter and whose knowledge counts. Technical communicators who design for communities without those communities’ participation risk reproducing the same extraction that Linda Tuhiwai Smith critiques in research [@jones2016].
Translingual realities
The translingual approach argues that all communication draws on multiple languages, dialects, and registers — that monolingualism is an ideology, not a natural condition [@canagarajah2013]. This doesn’t require abandoning this vault’s English-language conventions, but it does require honesty about what those conventions include and exclude. Bruce Horner and others propose treating language difference as a resource for meaning-making rather than an obstacle to communication [@horneretal2011].
Accessibility as justice
Accessibility is also a power concern. Jay Timothy Dolmage shows that academic writing conventions (and by extension documentation conventions) encode ableist assumptions about how readers process text [@dolmage2017]. Writing that serves only readers with standard cognitive profiles, standard vision, and standard processing speed excludes others — and the exclusion is built into the conventions, not just the content.
Connections
- Decolonial Pedagogy — the pedagogy module’s foundational lesson on how education encodes power relations
- Paulo Freire — the banking model applies to writing as much as teaching: writing that “deposits” information into passive readers reproduces the same structure
- bell hooks — engaged pedagogy’s insistence on the whole person challenges writing conventions that strip voice and embodiment from prose
- Asao Inoue — antiracist writing assessment, labor-based alternatives to quality-standard grading
- Natasha Jones — social justice in technical communication, coalitional approaches
- Plain language specification — the vault’s operational writing standard, which this topic interrogates without rejecting
- Discourse community — the concept that explains why “clear” varies across contexts
- Genre — Carolyn Miller’s insight that genres are social actions means genre conventions encode social norms — including norms about who speaks, how, and to whom
- Translingual writing — challenges monolingual assumptions in writing standards
- Accessibility — writing conventions that exclude readers with disabilities are a power issue
Sources
- George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” [@orwell1946]
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970)
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (hooks, 1994)
- Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action” [@miller1984]
- Karen Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design [@schriver1997]
- Anne Beaufort, College Writing and Beyond [@beaufort2007]
- Bruce Horner et al., “Language Difference in Writing” [@horneretal2011]
- Suresh Canagarajah, Translingual Practice [@canagarajah2013]
- Asao Inoue, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies [@inoue2015]
- Natasha Jones, “The Technical Communicator as Advocate” [@jones2016]
- Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism [@dolmage2017]