Inclusive language: what it really means and why it matters

Inclusive language has moved into the mainstream conversation over the past few years, showing up not just in the agendas of people who write for the web but also in boardrooms, newsrooms, and university classrooms. And yet it remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in our field. Some reduce it to a list of forbidden words, others confuse it with gender-neutral grammar hacks, and some dismiss it as a purely political stance. I see it in simpler, broader terms: inclusive language is the tool that determines whether a person feels part of a conversation or is left out.

I have spent more than twenty years writing for digital products, first in-house and now as a freelancer, and I have watched this topic shift from a niche concern for insiders to a strategic priority. I want to walk you through what writing inclusively actually means, what the most authoritative international sources have to say, how the conversation changes when it lands in Italian, and why it is worth investing time in, whether you write for a brand or write as yourself.

What we mean by inclusive language

Let’s start with a definition I particularly like, from Atlassian’s content design guidelines: inclusive language is free from words, phrases, or tones that reflect prejudice, stereotypes, or discriminatory views toward specific people. It does not mean ticking off a list of good and bad terms. It means adopting a writing approach that avoids harmful assumptions and shallow stereotypes and treats readers with respect.

I find this definition valuable because it shifts the focus from vocabulary to method. Swapping one word for another, considered more correct, is not enough on its own. What’s needed is a shift in perspective about who we picture on the other side of the screen. Nielsen Norman Group, one of the world’s reference points for user experience design, defines inclusive design as a methodology for creating products that understand and welcome people of every background and ability, addressing factors such as age, economic situation, geographic location, language, ethnicity, and more. The guiding principle is not to satisfy as many users as possible, but to meet the needs of as many people as possible, including those left at the margins by interfaces built with a standard audience in mind.

The difference between accessible language and inclusive language

One of the most useful distinctions I have come across comes from Officina Microtesti. This Italian studio, founded by Valentina Di Michele, serves as a benchmark for UX writing and content design. Their blog states something I fully agree with: without inclusion, there is no accessibility. Inclusive language and accessible language are not the same thing, but they share some common ground.

Accessible language speaks to everyone and is understandable both lexically, at the level of individual words, and semantically, in the sense the message takes on within the context in which it appears. A concrete example helps clarify the nuance: “The file generated an error” is lexically clear, since the words themselves are easy to understand, but it fails semantically, because it gives no direction and leaves the reader stuck. Inclusive language, on the other hand, works on a different level: it reaches everyone regardless of age, education, ethnicity, or gender. And the test for whether we are using it, as Officina Microtesti puts it, is almost mathematical: a text that does not include automatically excludes.

The shapes exclusion takes in digital products

Anyone writing digital content holds more power than they might think over who feels part of the experience and who does not. Nielsen Norman Group cites a Facebook support form that asked users unable to register under their “legal name” to upload a confirmation document. This request puts transgender people or those with unconventional names in a difficult position. They also point to the opposite, virtuous example of Tinder, which lets users freely specify their gender identity while also offering more than thirty predefined options, a level of specificity that makes people who are normally invisible on standard forms feel recognized.

These examples show how exclusion in digital products takes many forms: access barriers disguised as technical rules, identity-forcing fields, binary options that fail to reflect people’s real lives, and frustrating experiences born of microcopy written with only one type of user in mind. The crucial point, also raised by UX Content Collective, is that potentially every user of a digital product can experience exclusion, even briefly: think of someone browsing under stress, someone using an app in a language that isn’t their own, or someone navigating a moment of anxiety while filling out a medical or financial form.

Why it matters for the audience

Writing inclusively is not a polite extra; it is a structural part of usability. UX Content Collective explains this well: accessible writing helps everyone navigate digital experiences more easily because language is part of the interface. When content is confusing, overly complex, or loaded with jargon, it becomes a real barrier, particularly for people with cognitive disabilities, low literacy, or those who rely on assistive technology such as screen readers.

Even small adjustments make a measurable difference. Replacing a generic “click here” with descriptive link text noticeably improves the experience for screen reader users. Cutting down on idioms and simplifying instructions helps people with cognitive challenges. Language, as UX Content Collective puts it, is a powerful tool for inclusion: it can welcome people in, or shut them out of the conversation entirely.

Why it matters for the brand

This is where things get interesting for anyone who still views inclusive language as a cost or a constraint. The data tells a different story. A 2024 study by the Unstereotype Alliance, an initiative led by UN Women in partnership with Oxford’s Saïd Business School, analyzed 392 brands across 58 countries and proved, for the first time at this scale, the positive impact of inclusive advertising on revenue, sales, and brand value, both in the short and long term. The findings challenged the widespread assumption that inclusive practices hurt business performance, an argument frequently invoked against adopting more respectful language and never supported by solid empirical evidence.

The numbers around trust are just as telling. Research from The Female Quotient, Google, and Ipsos, surveying nearly 3,000 US consumers, found that 38% of people trust a brand more when it shows diversity in its communications, and 64% of respondents took some form of action after seeing an inclusive ad. The flip side is equally significant: an Adobe survey found that 34% of US adults stopped supporting brands, temporarily or permanently, that they felt didn’t represent them, a figure that climbs to 58% among LGBTQ respondents and 53% among Black respondents.

Of course, consistency matters more than stated intentions. Research published in the Journal of Marketing warns that inclusivity initiatives perceived as superficial breed skepticism precisely among the people they are meant to reach, because those who feel historically underrepresented in the marketplace are quicker to spot when a company is communicating without genuinely understanding the needs of the people it’s talking to. The takeaway for anyone who writes: inclusive language works when it grows out of real listening, not when it gets applied as a superficial coat of paint over a product built for a narrow audience.

Inclusive language in Italian: a different challenge

Translating these principles into Italian means reckoning with a language that is structurally different from English. Valentina Di Michele explains this well in an Apogeo article on Italian UX writing: while English has no real linguistic dress code, using a single form for second person singular and plural, Italian carries masculine and feminine endings across both singular and plural, on top of a generally more formal register. Italian words take up roughly 30% more space than their English equivalents on average, a difference that hits directly where space is tight, in headlines, buttons, and form labels.

Layered on top of this technical complexity is the question of gender, which is considerably more intricate in English. Unlike English, which can fall back on the neutral pronoun “they,” Italian has no equivalent neutral form, and the debate over gender identity in language is just as heated here, surfacing in personal, professional, and political spaces alike. In its guide to inclusive UX writing, Officina Microtesti offers a clear principle: in Italian, as in most languages, the gender field is unnecessary in most contexts and should only be requested when strictly necessary, for example, in a medical or dating app.

A concrete example I find illuminating concerns how we describe professional roles. Officina Microtesti recounts how, in writing about a creative software product, the team moved away from a rigid list of job titles like “graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and 3D artists” toward a more open phrasing such as “it helps you create graphics, photography, illustrations, and 3D art.” It’s a subtle shift from a prescriptive and exclusive form to a more inclusive one, shifting the focus from professional labels to the actions a person actually takes.

The work of Officina Microtesti and the DiParola Festival

In Italy, the professional landscape around clear, inclusive, and accessible language has a solid anchor in Officina Microtesti, the studio founded and led by Valentina Di Michele, who describes herself as Italy’s godmother of UX content. Together with Andrea Fiacchi and Alice Orrù, Officina Microtesti published “Scrivi e lascia vivere,” a handbook from Flaco Edizioni dedicated entirely to inclusive and accessible writing, with a chapter specifically on microcopy and UX writing. I consider it a key reference for anyone working with digital words in Italy, because it translates principles often theorized only in English-speaking circles into practices grounded in our own language.

Alongside this editorial work sits a broader commitment, the DiParola Festival, launched in 2023 and now in its third edition, organized by the nonprofit Associazione Linguaggi Chiari, chaired by Di Michele herself. It is the first Italian event entirely dedicated to clear, inclusive, and accessible language. I had the chance to be part of it as a volunteer for two years, an experience that let me see up close just how much genuine interest exists in Italy around these themes: communication professionals, public administration staff, healthcare workers, journalists, all united by the same question: how do we make ourselves truly understood by anyone who reads us?

One of the most interesting findings from the Osservatorio sui Linguaggi Chiari, presented during one edition of the Festival, also captures the resistance this topic faces: 54% of respondents said attention to inclusive language feels more like a communication trend than a genuine concern for people. It’s a finding worth sitting with, because it confirms how easy it is for brands and institutions to slide into performative inclusivity, the very risk the international research mentioned earlier identified as the biggest obstacle to making these practices actually work.

Voices from the field

Coming back to the perspective of people who write for digital products every day, I want to close with a voice that ties language directly to narrative power. Kinneret Yifrah, a leading author in the international UX writing community, puts it powerfully: language shapes reality; writers shape language; and through our writing, we can shape reality. It’s a thought I hold close, because it captures the responsibility anyone working with words carries, the responsibility to choose, sentence by sentence, what kind of world we are building for the people reading us.

Andy Welfle, Product Content Strategist at Adobe, quoted in Officina Microtesti’s guide, offers an image I find effective for explaining the value-laden power of language: saying a person is confined to a wheelchair carries an implicit judgment; saying a person uses a wheelchair frees the sentence from that judgment. A small difference on paper, a substantial one in effect.

Where to start writing more inclusively

There is no magic formula, but a few practical principles show up across every source I consulted for this piece. Using plain language, free of unnecessary technical jargon, helps everyone, not only people with cognitive or reading difficulties. Avoiding assumptions about gender, age, geographic background, or ability reduces the risk of excluding someone without even noticing. Involving people with lived experience of the topics at hand during content creation, rather than only at final review, helps keep good intentions from staying superficial. And finally, measuring the real impact of the choices made through testing with a diverse range of users remains the only way to know whether a text truly includes or excludes in a more polished way.

Inclusive language, in the end, is not a list of words to avoid. It’s a daily exercise in paying attention to the person we cannot see on the other side of the screen, someone who exists, reads, and decides whether to stay or leave based on how we choose to speak to them. I like to close with my own personal mantra: “Words are windows, or they’re walls,” Marshall B. Rosenberg.

What is inclusive language?