A year on and I’m at the halfway point for my MA. There hasn’t been a lot of time and energy for other writing, but this post is because one topic has gotten under my skin recently: the need to write responsibly.

I’ve spent this summer researching for my dissertation. My topic includes how to effectively represent diversity. It is a lot narrower than that, but to avoid this whole blog replicating my essay, we’ll call it that. A key theme is the notion of writing responsibly for our audience. This came up in depictions of characters acting outside the law, e.g. violent rebellion being used to unseat regimes rather than democracy, and murderers being killed rather than face judicial process. It also came up in more nuanced ways, e.g. how do we depict masculinity and what’s the relationship of that to rates of male suicide.

It became incredibly relevant when misinformation about the killing of 3 children triggered riots across the UK. It came up again when Taylor Swift was criticised for not commenting on Vienna concert cancellations. It crystallised when she posted after the tour about the intentional silence to avoid provoking attacks on her fans.

We live in a world where it takes seconds to type (or dictate) a post in the public domain. Pause for considering the impact of those words doesn’t happen often enough. It’s hard when it feels like there are sides and we want to express support for someone or their community. How often do we pause and question the basis – the support – for statements? Relevant to this: part of The Guardian’s donations plug (helping them stay publicly accessible) is that they fact-check.

For me, I want to write as responsibly as I can. I want to share words that inspire people to pause and think and try to be kind. I want to share correct information if I am sharing information. There will always be a person behind the other keyboard. In the public domain, there will be other recipients as well.

Social media with character limits like X strikes me as a terrible space for real discussion. That said, I’m not sure where the right place is. The trend toward concise, definitive written statements may just mean we ought to be tackling this in verbal conversations instead. The AI assistant on this website is obsessed with my sentences all being too long, too complicated or lacking confidence. I tried following it, but it felt staccato and stripped out the nuance that this sort of discussion needs. In some discussions, particularly on divisive topics, we need qualifiers. Fundamentally, we need to be better at agreeing to disagree as a society. That’s particularly difficult for conflict avoidant types in person, but there shouldn’t need to be animosity in it. People are entitled to their point of view if they are not breaking the law, however much we may not like that view.

Here’s my challenge: When we disagree, we need to start from a place of recognising that those individuals with the opposing view will feel that they are entirely right. They will think that we are the ones needing to be educated. In some discussions, they will be right. We need to listen to understand why they think what they do rather than telling them that they are wrong without insight. If we’re willing to hear that education, we might find our minds change. If we don’t, they will at least feel their position has been respected and might be willing to hear counter-arguments. They might come around, or else a genuine middle ground may be more likely to be found. None of that is possible if we don’t go beyond the surface of a punchy headline assertion.

I know that in the heat of the moment, we all have times we speak or act first. We might do it with the best of intention – to protect, defend or help – but when we get it wrong, the next step is to acknowledge it. It’ll help us be less hasty next time and reinforce that we can be trusted.

My ending thought today is this: Inclusion and diversity don’t work if we’re just manufacturing a new Other. That is simply storing up new problems and resentment. If we can’t find evidence to support a comment, we shouldn’t amplify it. If we don’t have time to think through the impact of what we want to share, we need to think hard on whether it’s the right time to speak. Articulating a point of view goes hand in hand with taking responsibility for the reasonably foreseeable impact it could have.