The Language of Impartial Community Leaders

Avoiding language that risks your community’s trust

As Community Managers, our job is to craft healthy, constructive places where people can express their ideas and connect with each other. To do that, we sometimes have to intervene, mediate, or moderate in a way that firmly defines what kind of community we are without losing our community’s trust. When engaging, we often have to check our own biases or subjective value judgments before our fingers hit the keys. Rarely do we want to take sides in a personal disagreement, lambaste someone publicly, or otherwise risk our integrity as a facilitator.

Now, that isn’t to say that we can’t steer conversation or point out to our community members that they aren’t following guidelines — that’s very important work. However, Community Managers can lose their credibility very quickly if they use divisive, subjective language. For example…

• Overly assertive language that could be readily and easily proved to be contradictory: “This is the most offensive thing I’ve seen on this forum… We’ve never seen anything anything close to this out of line…”
• Vague rationale and reactionary jibs — even though they’re really easy: “Absolutely not. Deleted… Wow. Screw this… Omg. No…”
• Objections based on persons…