The Literary Wars, Before and After the Language Crusade

On Karen Yin’s ‘The Conscious Style Guide’ and Adam Szetela’s ‘That Book Is Dangerous!’

Demonstrators in New York City, 2024, Photograph, Getty Images

Is politics downstream of culture? Not in the publishing industry.

This is evident in the recent publication of two books on editing and publishing, Karen Yin’s The Conscious Style Guide (2024) and Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! (2025). The first is a call for editors to advance social justice through equitable language while the second reports from inside the publishing industry on the outcome. It would be blithe to say that the second book is sufficient condemnation of Yin’s project, but Szetela’s analysis of moral panics in literary culture is far from the only evidence that the search for, and imposition of, correct speech can be socially and politically ruinous.

The authors’ opposed views on editing philosophy and language politics have made small waves, and reception diverges in their book reviews. Yin’s are entirely positive — consistent with her popularity among editors — while Szetela’s are mixed.

From the Editor’s Desk, Andy Bechtel declares that Yin’s style guide gives the reader a “process to achieve editing enlightenment.” Sharon Cozens, writing for BoldFace, claims that Yin’s guide will “increase the chance that readers will recognize themselves . . . and connect with [books].” These reviewers assume that the conscious style demonstrates enlightenment and authenticity. Rather, this editorial style might be characterized as designing Frankenstein’s monster by committee.

Szetela earned positive reception in a Leonardo review, where Jan Baetens calls the book a “wake-up call” to the consequences of political correctness on literature. For Baetens, Szetela does the hard work of chronicling the moral panic that has led to canceled publications when a writer is accused of “moral and political flaws (racism, homophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, fat-shaming, ageism, eurocentrism — ‘white supremacy’ often functioning as the shortcut for all these evils).” Because of the heat of such accusations, most of Szetela’s industry insiders demanded anonymity.

Emmet Fraizer, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, is less receptive to Szetela’s argument, presenting cancellations, like Amélie Wen Zhao’s, as all smoke and no fire. In “The Cancel-Culture Canard,” Fraizer critiques Szetela’s study by taking the usual tack: Szetela is hurting the oppressed. This critic’s canard is the usual refrain from those who object politically. You should have written a different book! Invariably, that other book (Books Under Fire: A Hit List of Banned and Challenged Children’s Books) already exists.

While Fraizer correctly reminds us of the books banned for conservative reasons, on the order of “23,000 book bans since 2021,” the argument against this type of censorship is as old as John Milton’s Areopagitica in 1644. Szetela musters a who’s who against such “purist” censorship, including titans like Toni Morrison. But the rise of a censorious left — contra its historical support of free speech — has introduced new criteria for sensitivity and harm. Already infamous, this censorship has resulted in backhanded erasures in Roald Dahl’s new, sensitive editions, effectively transforming a low-class female clerk into a high-class CEO, a literary girlbossing.

Fraizer acknowledges Szetela’s doubt of “moral entrepreneurs” who impose identity filters on shrinking industries, stating, “He is, of course, correct about this.” But Fraizer then bizarrely situates Szetela in a rogue’s gallery of fascist collaborators, conspiracy theorists, and alleged sexual abusers. Fraizer’s review amounts to the tagline of a decade of political polarization: my side isn’t censorious, but if it is, then it’s a good thing.

Now, let’s put these books in conversation.

Yin, author of The Conscious Style Guide, grounds her editing primer in religion, politics, and philosophical assumptions about language. She refers to her book as a style guide, although the traditional guide is closer to a list of rules than Yin’s “system” or “movement.” The editor won’t find an accessible list of terms here because a politically correct lexicon “would be outdated before it hit the presses.” Thus, the editor is encouraged to think deeply about the role of the editor in making a just world.

The editor does not follow her conscience but rather calculates which specific words oppress, asking, “Whose oppression does this perpetuate?” To move beyond copyediting words in the dismantling of privilege, the developmental editor should know that “equity requires the exclusion of overrepresented or frequently represented groups.” That is, choosing writers, characters, and story subjects based on race, sex, and sexuality. This crystal-clear politics leads Yin to recognize the popular insult “Karen” is “a slur,” but one she supports. “Right now, it does more good than harm.”

It’s a messy game, but that’s the politics of language, baby.

You might disagree with her logic or even her stated politics, but you’re in good company, for Yin reveals that conscious language is a battlefield. Throughout the style guide, the reader will discover signs of conflict, like loose fur after a cat fight. Yin hopes “you can be charitable in your reading despite [her] flaws,” hiding behind the book for cover. She acknowledges that practitioners of conscious language will “disagree vehemently,” that the language will sometimes “do harm in the long run,” that one must learn to apologize (there’s a section on how) or, like the author, confess “what a jerk I am.”

The fur really starts flying when Szetela documents the consequences of equitable language in That Book Is Dangerous! Reporting from the frontlines of young adult and children’s literature, Szetela chronicles the cancellations of precisely the kind of underrepresented writers Yin champions. One case is the short-lived self-cancellation of Amélie Wen Zhao’s book Blood Heir because, according to detractors, many of whom had not read the book, it represented slavery without racism, criticism centered on a character whose race is ambiguous at best. Another case was the campaign against A Birthday Cake for George Washington by writer Ramin Ganeshram, illustrator Vanessa Brantley-Newton, and editor Andrea Davis Pinkney, all women of color with garlands of industry awards.

Perhaps Yin envisioned this double-edged nature when recognizing that “adoption of equitable language is not evidence that our society’s deepest prejudices have eased.” This lamentation, which might be enough to scupper the project, is revisited elsewhere, with Yin declaring, “Conscious language is no panacea for societal ills.” One feels that Yin has struggled mightily on the road to linguistic utopia. Is the struggle worth it? The fact that the rise of conscious language is coincident with falling standards (life expectancy lagging, literacy rates falling) and rising costs (housing, food, medical care) might cause the reader to itch furiously. Surely, conscious language must provide some benefit, even if it’s only aesthetic?

Szetela offers insight into the philosophical roots of the new politically correct speech. He is primarily concerned with the leftist politics that smoldered in the mid-2010s, gained heat with the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, only to have the Covid lockdowns poured on them like accelerant. If the reader expects a biased treatment, then Szetela will surprise with his evenhandedness, recognizing early the lack of representation for non-whites in publishing houses (as writers and editors) and inside books (as narrators and characters).

The cure offered by Yin et al., however, is worse than the ailment, a bitter tonic made of two ingredients: presentism and essentialism.

The first, Szetela explains, is to “rewrite the past in terms of the present,” something that Yin recommends explicitly, asking, “Why be accurate with slurs, outdated terms, and stereotypical portrayals when every other detail of a historical world is conjecture and fantasy?” She likens narratives set in the past to building a house out of asbestos — the past is so contaminated, only a fool would handle it without a respirator. Szetela summarizes essentialism as the “link between identity and an ‘authentic’ perspective . . . premised on the idea that . . . people are bound together by their identities.” Accordingly, Yin recommends that writers, dwelling on identity, ask, “Are you an appropriate messenger for this content?”

Szetela cuts to the core of the moral panic by documenting the social effects of these modes of political thought, but an analysis of the style of conscious language is needed because it represents more than online shit-flinging. Correct speech is political — its reasoning should be grounded in rhetoric. What effect will this language have on my audience? The conscious language style is a formal register of English that is Latinized, nominalized, verbose, ahistorical, colorless, internally incoherent, and hypertextual.

Book publishing has increasingly become home to college-educated writers and editors. They have brought a higher register to their work, one that is considerably more Latinized and nominalized (turning verbs into nouns). Recall the year 1066, when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons. The English language, since then, is a Germanic root upon which the Romance languages were grafted. This change is evident in the difference between the names for livestock and their butchered meat: sheep (Germanic) and mutton (Latinate). This fact of our language has not changed; our college Normans tend toward a higher register.

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell laments the inflooding of Latinate words (adding syllables but not sense) and nominalization (adding -ism), discovering that, in the end, “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.” Conscious language injects ambiguity and partisanship, as Orwell astutely noted 80 years ago. Perhaps it is her fluency with this rarefied language that leads Yin to declare that academic neologisms are an “organic solution.”

The register shift from a Germanic English to a Romance one is present in the recommended terms that are (again for emphasis) not presented in an accessible list. From spokesman to representative, craftsmanship to artisanship, tone-deaf to insensitive, mankind to humankind, landlord or landlady to rental property owner — in each case, the shift is from the Anglo-Saxon root to the Latin branch. Some of these terms may be preferred, even well-advised, but the tilt of conscious language generally is away from plain English. Like the lone speaker of Esperanto, Yin wonders why we’d bother with our natural language.

To paraphrase Szetela’s portrait of the equity brigade, there are three levels of language bureaucrats: the true believers, the carpetbaggers, and the complacent. Most of us reside in the third category, picking up the correct terms as they cascade down from our moral betters. Yet there is a natural economy to language. We resist convolution when the direct term is simpler by a good margin. When Yin recommends equitable synonyms, the verbosity of conscious language becomes apparent. From disabled to differently abled is only an expansion from three to six syllables, yet other locutions are inflationary marvels. Instead of Black police officer, why not a police officer who happens to be Black? Certainly, we can go further. Stretch your legs! Instead of a Latino, why not a light-skinned person who looks Latine? Still got some gas in the tank? How’s this for you: instead of white people, try people with roots in Europe, the Middle East, and/or North Africa who identify as White.

This is seeing the euphemism treadmill as an opportunity for cardio.

Languages brim with historical accidents in the form of idioms. My favorite in Spanish is calavera no chilla, or skull doesn’t whine (to pay the piper, usually with a hangover). Watch a foreign-language speaker smile when you try to explain that to die is also to kick the bucket. Lest we offend the milkmaids among us, we’d best remove the arbitrary history of our language, like dethorning a rose. Conscious language asks that we strip our language of history, excluding such idioms as low man on the totem pole, in favor of the limp noodle that is person of least influence.

Goodbye, old wives’ tale! Hello, nonbinary life partner’s ways of knowing!

On White, as a description of race, it is dizzying to realize that both anti-racists and white supremacists wish to raise racial consciousness through capitalization, something Yin certainly knows because this is addressed in Nancy Coleman’s article “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” which she quotes. The lack of internal coherence goes much further than this example, but it’s important to point out that Yin insists on endonyms (groups naming themselves), except for her politically preferred exonyms (groups named by others). When I studied in the Amazon with the Huaorani nation, I learned the group’s name came from the usual root, their term for people or men. Outsiders called them Auca, however, an exonym derived from the Quechua for savage. Among other examples, Yin recommends we refer to pro-life activists as anti-abortion, despite what they call themselves.

It is no surprise that concerns motivating editorial change are often textual. We learn this in Yin’s support for graphical changes, like Latinx and dropping from Asian-American the hyphen, which we are told “serve[s] to divide even as [it is] meant to connect.” The author of the article “Drop the Hyphen in ‘Asian American,’” Henry Fuhrmann, insists that the hyphen “can connote an otherness.” This otherness doesn’t emerge from speech. It’s a graphical quibble, hypertextual. Fuhrmann bases this observation not on consistency, instead building from a novelist’s offhand comment. Fuhrmann describes the hyphen as if it were a semicolon; yet the hyphen’s common use is to combine modifiers, in a punctuation-cum-sinew manner. The objections to traditional forms of style consistency are so personal as to be utterly unique.

Even Yin justifies her use of White by way of the editor’s primary concern for consistency. So, while Anglo-Americans may suffer under the otherness of their hyphen, Asian Americans are liberated from the graphical foible by celebrity authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen, who popularized the whole crusade.

Such approaches to editorial change are common in America.

The traditional reason editors use italics for foreign words in English manuscripts is to avoid confusion: no, querido lector, you’re not having a stroke. It is a question of readability; one might even call this reasoning accessibility. The novelist Junot Díaz launched the war on italics as “a political move” because italics connote “otherness,” or as Yin puts it, “may signal that [a foreign word] is not normal.” Se pide al lector tomar un momento para reflexionar sobre lo normal en una narración en inglés. Editors have traditionally butted horns with writers in defense of the reader, but because this language change is attached to identity, conventional reasoning fails. Yin’s book is bristling with accessibility, to the point of including sub-tables of contents and section summaries. Yet all consistency is dropped when a hunky celebrity author makes an appeal to authenticity.

You might feel that I object to conscious language kit and caboodle, but that’s simply not true. We should respect the ways people speak about themselves. Yin assures us that conscious language is distinct from the prescriptions of political correctness because hers is a perpetual revolution. There has been a long push for descriptivist literary instruction, where language comes out of common parlance. This emerged as a populist counter to prescriptivist models, language imposed from classical, one might even say, patriarchal sources. Yin’s conscious language is still prescriptivist, but the prescribers have changed: college-educated, middle- to upper-class professionals raising a standard with professors, activists, nonprofits, and NGOs. You can be certain that the activist organizations informing conscious style are not conservative, religious, fond of gun ranges, or even the majority.

There are admirable achievements in PC language, such as the preference now for firefighter, unequivocally cooler than fireman. Others failed to catch on, like the use of the hypertextual s/he in the ’90s — a contraction of she or he. What I don’t agree with is Yin’s reasoning: we are simply never told how a hyphen performs the opposite of its primary function, how italics belittle or other, how English speakers removing gender from Spanish will liberate Spanish speakers (against their will, apparently). Any given reason is contradicted by the next, resulting in a logical series so fraught a list of terms would make the failed prescriptivism too readily apparent. It is no wonder that, in a linguistic context where personal meaning is everything, Szetela neatly documents wars of authenticity and identity.

At its core, conscious language demands of the editor two things: language guidance must come from activists, and the editor must know the balance of equity. First, taking guidance from activists inevitably arrives at contradiction. For this reason, the “Disability Language Style Guide,” quoted by Yin, declares, “We are no longer offering advice regarding a default.” One group demands identity-first language, another group demands person-first language, each declares the justice of their language is self-evident rather than a matter of arbitrary taste. Yin insists that editors “can use language to reach into minds and shift perceptions,” but Szetela reveals what that mind-bending results in: venomous struggles, politics that are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

The question of correct speech and its political fallout is of increasing importance since the success of the 2024 Trump campaign, nudged into the White House under the low-register, anti-academic slogan “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” No matter your voting preference, the efficacy of this language is clear. It is a classic American thumb to the nose for academic scolds and moralizing elites.

After the last election, the centrist think tank Third Way published “Was It Something I Said?” to analyze Democratic linguistic style, discovering a gap between the party’s big-tent goals and its language, which makes Democrats sound “like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory enforcers of wokeness.” This language is characterized by therapy speak, seminar-room language, organizer jargon, gender/orientation correctness, and shifting racial constructs. The language is plainly off-putting to the beer-and-pretzel crowd.

Perhaps the emergence of this style of language is not so much out of righteousness as desperation. In “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” Tyler Austin Harper reveals that, contrary to the “go woke, go broke” adage, the humanities “went woke in large part because they were broke.” The grantmaker Mellon Foundation is to financially strapped academics a poisoned chalice: money in trade for political allegiance. For the publishing industry in kind, anemic growth, lower wages, fewer men, and byzantine political postures may result in more of the same. My own students — smart and sensitive editors, wanting to do the right thing — have expressed grave concerns, asking me if it’s even possible for a white editor to edit a Black writer. One paranoid student assumed that the noun Jew was offensive.

What is the effect on editing when the purpose, as Harper puts it, is not wisdom but advocacy? Guests on the recent New York Times Opinion podcast episode “Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?” declared, in a maximally catty way, that half of “woke” language is dead or dying. Szetela’s book provides a moving image of Yin’s project: a brigade of language cops, increasingly isolated, secure in the purity of their efforts, deaf to good sense, blind to the ruin in their wake.

The editor’s relationship to language is a high-wire act. With her audience on the far side of the chasm, she steps forward, the balance pole in hand, tradition on one side and innovation on the other. Yin’s strategy is tantamount to baiting birds to land on only one side of the balance pole, the innovations of advocates. These are greedy birds because they are self-righteous. The greater the number of these birds, the harder it is for our tightrope walker to reach her audience. Our editor is perilously close to falling into the gap. The absurdity that Szetela documents is that a good portion of the bird-baiters are happy to provoke the fall.

M. D. Bennett is a freelance writer and editor living in the Pacific Northwest.