A discussion I have had with my elementary school writing students, my college students, and in my adult writing groups…. Is there such a thing as unbiased word choice?
Unbiased by definition is to be impartial and show no prejudice for or against something.
Clearly, when writing fiction or essays, or any kind of personal writing, choosing unbiased words is usually not a goal. As writers, we want to create specific visions, or evoke certain emotions, so our word choice needs to be biased. We want our readers to believe/feel something very specific, so therefore, we chose our words accordingly.
Journalists, on the other hand, want to report and share facts, so they seek unbiased words. When students summarize texts, they attempt to be unbiased. Even some personal writing, like describing a place or event, can seek to be unbiased.
However, even when describing something, the words we chose can reveal, and encourage, a biased point of view. I realized this with a writing activity I was doing with my student writing club this past year. We were working on strategies for making sure that the key elements are shared when describing an event. They had all just witnessed a disagreement between two administrators at our school. Yes- it was staged. I had asked them ahead of time to barge into our classroom, pretending to look for something, making a show of disagreeing, and then leaving.
When they left, the room was silent, the students stunned. I then asked them to take out a piece of paper, and without talking to anyone, describe what they just saw.
Many of the key details were the same and unbiased- the people, the place, the item they were looking for. But when the students started adding adjectives, verbs, and adverbs to make their writing more vivid, biases, emerged.
An annoyed look. A livid expression. Walked out the door. Barged through the door.
Specific word choices created very different versions of what we had just witnessed.
The term unbiased surfaced again for me this week when I was attending an educational conference. In a session on artificial intelligence, speaker Hank Green said that in the age of technology, “Unbiased is only the average of our biases”.
That rattled around in my mind. Average. Between two extremes. In the middle. But is that what we want? In terms of our writing, do we want average?
Maybe unbiased is not the goal after all.
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