Capitalizing (on) Disability: A Unit(y) in Professional Editing

I presented the following at the 2010 WRTC Symposium. Your posts for this assignment don't have to be as involved or as long, but this does represent the kinds of topics you could discuss.

I use my experience as a professional writer and editor for nonprofit, corporate, and academic environments to discuss various processes and forms of writing in my classes. For example, my work for a public relations department housed in an agency that helps people with disabilities has helped me to critically think about how we write and edit subjects, to borrow from Foucault, who among others, says that discourse about an object in a certain time, a certain space, constructs that object. To know something, to make something real, we talk about it, we document it, we notate behaviors, actions, opinions of subjects—and it is that documentation that builds a history of interpretation about the subject, and thus builds a history of the subject itself. In this way, people, objects, whatever, are always rhetorically constructed.

This is, of course, quite evident in Othered people; marginalized groups are constructed as Other by those in the norm, and as specialists in writing, rhetoric, and tech comm, we spend time talking about how people talk about such groups, such subjects. My focus, then, is on representations of people who are deaf, reflecting a unit on editing disability in my TechSci Editing. In this course we discuss that, as editors, we’re not simply editing other people’s words and images; we’re taking part in editing those people—their values and standards—themselves. And not simply the people who write the words we’re editing, but the also the people writers are writing about. We’re also situating ourselves among standards, sometimes competing standards, and we must be aware of the positive and negative consequences of following one standard over another.

Take for example, the word deaf. Deaf scholar and rhetorician Brenda Brueggemann, among others, notes the difference between a lowercase “d” deaf and a capitalized “d” Deaf. Lowercasing the word deaf represents the audiological problems of hearing. Capitalizing the word Deaf connotes Deaf culture, a community of people who use sign language to communicate, who advocate for the rights of Deaf people, who are quite aware of being and participating in that community in order to forward the values of what it means to be deaf. From a practical standpoint, these constructions make sense for editors who work as advocates for the rights of people with disabilities. As a public relations person for this nonprofit way back when, I worked with one of our departments called the Chicago Hearing Society, who maintained the position that Brueggemann takes: capitalizing Deaf whenever we’re talking about people who are deaf. And so, when I wrote, for example, press releases for CHS, I would, of course, capitalize the "D". Then I’d send out the release to media throughout Chicagoland. The largest newspapers in Chicago, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, for example, would print some of those news releases, but they’d edit the word deaf with a lowercase “d”. Now, this might not seem a big deal to the general reader; I suspect it’s what the reader would expect to see, and it certainly follows the AP style guide’s recommendations to not put explicit focus on a disability, which is what capitalizing the "D" does. It brings focus onto a word that we normally see as lowercase, emphasizing something different about this so-called disability.

And that’s part of the problem for Deaf people, for Deaf culture. Lowercasing the "D" is seen by—at least by Deaf people I worked with—as stripping a bit of identity away from them. Capitalizing on the capitalizing of the word Deaf gives Deaf people a sense of pride, of community membership, of the importance of belonging, of promoting worthwhile ideologies. Despite a 1990 recommendation by the American Society for Newspaper Editors’ who recommended capitalizing Deaf to connote culture, many editors have been slow to adopt such a suggestion. And so, we have Othered standards that compete with more hegemonic standards. And, quite frankly, at the end of the day, it really does sometimes come down to picking battles: do we as advocates for disability and linguistic rights refuse to write press releases to inform the public about our services, about Deaf culture, if publications won’t consider our own standards? Or do we just let it go? The answer to this last question, for me, is no. I continue to fight, continue to resist, unquestioned standards.

So, here, my company’s editorial policy conflicts with another institution’s editorial policy—both adding up to construct a history of our subjects—in this case, those who are deaf. And this competition reflects a history of struggle. In addition to struggling against discrimination against people with disabilities in the workforce, in education, and in other institutions there is the challenge to be heard, to be listened to, and to be so in a way that does not jeopardize or erase individual as well as collective agency, experience, and identity . . . an identity that some people with disabilities—not all—want to construct for themselves and to resist the identities other, more powerful institutions construct for them. And it’s that more powerful construct—the lowercase "d"—that the general reader has knowledge of. The struggle does get tiring, though, and I no longer do public relations. Instead I teach about these experiences in order to make students aware that these issues exist—and that, hopefully, they buy into strategic resistance as well, learning for themselves what battles are important enough to fight.