Y10W24RC Words that Include or Exclude

This week you are exploring how specific word choices in everyday texts can signal to some people that they belong — and to others that they do not. The reading gives you practice in analysing how phrasing carries assumptions about who is considered normal and who is treated as an exception. As you read, stay alert to the moments where language that sounds neutral turns out, on closer examination, to be doing something more consequential.

Analytical / critical — Commentary

A commentary is a piece of analytical writing that examines specific examples closely, offering interpretation and developing a sustained argument about what those examples reveal. Writers use this form to analyse and evaluate — to move beyond describing what a text says and instead interrogate the assumptions and effects embedded in particular choices. The content typically includes quoted or paraphrased examples, close analysis of specific words or phrases, and a developing line of reasoning that builds toward a broader conclusion about how language works. Structurally, a commentary tends to move through its examples in sequence, examining each one before synthesising the patterns they collectively reveal. As a reader, your role is to follow the analytical reasoning carefully, evaluate whether the interpretations offered are convincingly supported by the evidence, and consider what the cumulative argument reveals about the relationship between language and power.

Before You Read

  • The commentary is organised around three distinct fictional text excerpts, each followed by analysis. Before you begin, note that the excerpts are the evidence — treat them as carefully as the analytical commentary that follows each one.
  • Think about how the same information can be communicated in ways that feel welcoming to some readers and distancing to others — without any single word being obviously wrong. This gap between surface meaning and underlying assumption is central to what this commentary explores.
  • The commentary's title makes a claim about what language can do to people, not just about them. Consider what that distinction might mean before you read.

While You Read

  • For each example, read the original excerpt before reading the analysis. Form your own initial response to the phrasing, then track how the commentary's analysis either confirms, extends, or complicates your reading.
  • Pay close attention to the revised versions the commentary offers as alternatives. They are not decorative — they are analytical tools that demonstrate precisely what the original phrasing was doing by showing what different choices would produce instead.
  • When the commentary introduces an analytical term — such as to name a particular pattern of language use — look at the surrounding explanation for context before moving on. The terms are defined through the examples, not in isolation.
  • Notice how the commentary distinguishes between what a word choice appears to do and what it actually does. This gap between surface and effect is where the analysis does its most precise work.

Read With Purpose

  • Notice which group of people is positioned as the assumed norm in each example — the reader the text appears to have been written for — and observe what language choices create that positioning.
  • Stay alert to the moments where the commentary acknowledges that exclusionary language is often unintentional, and consider what this implies about how language choices carry and reproduce assumptions without the writer necessarily realising it.
  • Consider how the revised versions of each excerpt communicate the same practical information while producing a different relationship between the text and the people it refers to.

Now read

The commentary

~7 min read · ~1089 words

Words That Push People Out

Language does not simply describe the world. It also shapes the relationships between people who use it — and between the people it refers to and those it leaves out. A single word choice can signal to a reader whether they are welcome in a text or whether they are being observed from a distance. This commentary examines three fictional text excerpts, each of which makes phrasing choices that include or exclude certain people. It analyses how those choices work, what assumptions they carry, and what alternative phrasing might achieve instead.

Example 1: The School Newsletter

Excerpt: ‘Students with special needs will be supported by aides throughout the excursion. All other students should arrive by 8:45 am.’

The phrase ‘all other students’ is the most significant choice here. By dividing the student group into two categories — those with ‘special needs’ and ‘all other students’

— the newsletter positions one group as the standard and the other as a deviation from it.

The implied norm is the student who does not require support; the student who does is marked as different, and that difference is placed before any shared identity.

The term ‘special needs’ carries its own complexity. In some contexts it is a recognised administrative category; in others it has come to feel reductive, condensing a wide range of individual circumstances into a single label. What is particularly significant here is the way the label precedes the noun — ‘students with special needs’ — rather than following it, which subtly places the condition before the person.

An alternative phrasing might read: ‘Students requiring additional support will be accompanied by aides. All students should arrive by 8:45 am.’ This version preserves the practical information while removing the binary division between supported and ‘other’

students. Framing the whole group under ‘all students’ signals that everyone belongs to the same community, whatever their individual arrangements.

Example 2: The Community Report

Excerpt: ‘The Verani community faces significant challenges in accessing services, largely due to cultural barriers and a reluctance to engage with mainstream institutions.’

This excerpt positions the Verani community — a fictional group — as the source of its own difficulties. The phrase ‘cultural barriers’ implies that the community’s culture is itself an obstacle, rather than acknowledging that institutions may not have been designed with this community’s practices, languages, or histories in mind. The word ‘reluctance’

attributes passivity and resistance to the community, without considering that what reads as reluctance from the outside may reflect entirely rational responses to prior negative experiences with institutions.

This is an example of deficit framing — a pattern in which a group is described primarily in terms of what it lacks or what it fails to do, relative to an unstated standard. Deficit framing can appear neutral because it uses factual-sounding language, but its effect is to locate the problem inside the community rather than in the systems surrounding it.

A reframed version might read: ‘The Verani community has faced significant barriers in accessing services, including service designs that have not reflected their cultural practices and languages.’ This version keeps the factual substance while shifting responsibility: the barriers are not inside the community but between the community and services that have not met them appropriately. The change is subtle but consequential.

Example 3: The Workplace Policy Document

Excerpt: ‘Employees are encouraged to raise any personal or family issues affecting their productivity with HR. The company understands that workers sometimes struggle to leave personal matters at the door.’

The phrase ‘leave personal matters at the door’ is a common workplace idiom, and its familiarity may make it easy to overlook. But examined carefully, it encodes an assumption:

that the appropriate professional is one who is able to separate their personal life cleanly from their working one. This model of the ideal worker assumes a life structured so that personal responsibilities — caregiving, health, family — do not intrude on working hours.

The word ‘struggle’ is also worth examining. It implies that failing to achieve this separation is a personal weakness — something the worker contends with — rather than a systemic reality that many people navigate without any support. The policy frames accommodation as a concession to human frailty rather than as a structural response to how people’s lives actually work.

A revision might read: ‘We recognise that employees’ lives outside work affect, and are affected by, their working experience. We encourage anyone navigating significant personal or family responsibilities to speak with HR about available supports.’ This version does not frame personal life as an intrusion to be managed. It acknowledges the two-way relationship between work and life, and positions support as a normal feature of employment rather than a reluctant concession.

What These Examples Share

Across all three excerpts, a common pattern emerges. Each one positions a particular kind of person — the unsupported student, the ‘mainstream’ institution, the worker without personal complications — as the invisible norm against which others are measured. Those who do not fit this norm are described in terms of their deviation from it: they have ‘special needs,’ they resist engagement, they struggle to comply.

This positioning — in which one group is the standard and others are described relative to it — is sometimes called othering. It is not always intentional. It often reflects the assumptions embedded in the language systems that writers inherit and reproduce without examination. But its effects are real: people who recognise themselves in the marginalised descriptions may feel that the text was not written for them, or that their presence in the world it describes is conditional.

Revising these texts is not about erasing difficulty or pretending that differences do not exist. It is about asking who the text assumes is reading it, and whether the language choices it makes communicate dignity and belonging to everyone it refers to.

Conclusion: The Reader Who Was Not Imagined

Every text imagines a reader. It does so through the choices it makes: who is named, who is labelled, whose circumstances are treated as normal, and whose are treated as complications. When those choices consistently place certain people at the centre and others at the margins, the cumulative effect is not neutral. It tells people, reliably and often invisibly, whether or not they were imagined when the text was written.

The capacity to notice this — to read closely enough to identify which assumptions are carried inside word choices that might otherwise seem unremarkable — is a form of critical literacy that has genuine stakes. Language that includes is not softer or less precise than language that excludes. It is simply more carefully made.

Check your vocabulary knowledge

deficit framing phr.
describing a group primarily in terms of what it lacks or fails to do
othering n.
the process of positioning people as outside the assumed norm of a text or community
marginalised adj.
placed at the edges of a text, system, or society and given less significance
positioning n.
the way language places people in relation to a norm or to each other
encodes v.
contains or carries a meaning or assumption, often without stating it directly