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What, in your opinion, is the sensitive and inclusive way to discuss a category of business that the author can fairly assume a significant fraction of the user
by Kalium 3y ago
What, in your opinion, is the sensitive and inclusive way to discuss a category of business that the author can fairly assume a significant fraction of the userbase has never interacted with? Should the author discard that assumption and presume every reader is deeply familiar with check cashing instead? We know, with reasonable statistical evidence from the FDIC, that this alternative assumption is untrue.
I ask because there is, as far as I can tell, no obvious way to do it. You could just as easily write an essay talking about carrier-provided phone financing, and it would expose a similar cultural rift where most Americans don't do that and are only very vaguely familiar with how it works.
Or is the glaring thing that you dislike here the clearly stated assumption that most of the readership is not like you? In which case perhaps we should simply request that authors not state such assumptions while they make them anyway in the interests of being maximally informative.
- chefandy 3y agoI did a google search for articles about temp laborers because I thought it would be a good analog, and this came up: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe https://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-t... Do you think this article is ineffective?
- Kalium 3y agoYes, I do think it's ineffective. It's needlessly ponderous, excessively emotive, and cares far more about its activist mission than questions like "How is the business structured?". It's not an accident that the central character is someone carefully chosen to be maximally sympathetic to a well-meaning, well-off, educated liberal white person. Moreover, a similarly sympathetic (and horrified progressive middle-class-assuming) portrait of a check cashing business and its customers would almost certainly read as incredibly condescending to someone who finds them a fact of life. The article quite clearly assumes its readers have never been temps, never been crammed into a van to work in a warehouse, and will be upset to learn the conditions in question. It just doesn't say so briefly, opting instead to bury the assumption. Do you want to read an article that portrays your younger self as a victim so that readers can feel bad and maybe learn about the financial structure of check cashing? At the risk of making a large assumption, that does not seem like it would help you feel included.
- chefandy 3y agoYes, the sentimental sensationalist yellow journalists at ProPublica have really gone over the top with that one. Oh brother.