Unspinning the Spin Quotes

“Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. Anna Jameson”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“Words like “everyone” are often used as if “everyone” can afford a new television, celebrates Christmas, can walk up stairs, is married or wants to be, can read, gets enough to eat, worries about a sunburn, and so on. Pseudogenerics are thought to include everyone because the people who use them are thinking only of themselves and their immediate world.”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“the story of teachers who took two groups of children to opposite ends of the playground: one group was told they were going to build “snowmen”; they made 11 snowmen and 1 snowwoman. The other group was told they were going to build “snow figures”; that group made 5 snowmen, 3 snowwomen, 2 snow dogs, 1 snow horse, and 1 snow spaceship.”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“One problem with gender-free terms, however, is that they sometimes obscure reality. Battered spouse implies that men and women are equally battered; this is far from true. Parent is too often taken to mean mother and obscures the fact that more and more fathers are involved in parenting;”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“Gender-specific words (councilwoman, businessman, altar girl) are neither good nor bad in themselves, but they sometimes identify and even emphasize a person’s sex when it is not necessary (and is sometimes even objectionable) to do so. Male and female versions of a root word are also likely to be weighted quite differently (governor/governess, master/mistress).”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“To ensure gender-fairness, ask yourself: Would I write the same thing in the same way about a person of the other sex? Would I mind if this were said of me? If you are describing the behavior of children on the playground, to be gender-fair you will refer to girls and boys an approximately equal number of times, and you will carefully observe what the children do, and not just assume”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“Sexist language promotes and maintains attitudes that stereotype people according to gender while assuming that the male is the norm—the significant gender. Nonsexist language treats both sexes equally and either does not refer to a person’s sex when it is irrelevant or refers to men and women and to girls and boys in symmetrical ways.”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

“But Unspinning the Spin is a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary guide to words and phrases—their meanings, sources, backgrounds, suggested uses, and alternatives—than has been published so far. It’s a guide for journalists and editors in this and other countries, for bloggers creating their own media and for government officials creating policy, for students and teachers at all levels, for activists, workers in communication fields, and for any reader who loves the English language.”
― Rosalie Maggio, Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language