Have I spent about a week working on this post at this point? Yep, because I will inevitably have a Wall of Thoughts when someone asks for input. Sorry, Kevin… pretty much anyone on wikiHow, volunteer or staff, can tell you that this is a habit of mine.
Wait… so we legitimately
get to corrupt you? Awesome!
Thanks for the clarification on the transgender topics (and the subdomains too, for that matter) – I really appreciate that! It’s much easier to outline my thoughts knowing what this might entail. And I love hearing that the intention is to be inclusive; a lot of sites still aren’t making an effort with that, so it really means a lot that we are.
Since you were asking about getting the articles out to more people, what we specifically want to see in the relationship content, and what makes us trust the source – and because I’ve spent most of my time here focused on writing content – I’m going to focus my answers around what I want to see in terms of content
, rather than visual aesthetics, because the content is what drives the site. Since this is a very, very long wall of thoughts, I’m putting them under their own individual section:
Diversity that's "just there"
In general, I’d really like to see diversity. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I’m queer and disabled, and we have readers and editors of color or different financial backgrounds. There has
been a lot of improvement on the discussion of sexuality, and to a lesser extent gender identity, but our relationship content doesn’t tend to factor in anything else unless that “anything else” is specifically named in the title. And while I know it’s not possible to be 100% inclusive in everything, sometimes I wish we had more examples/scripts, images, and so forth where diversity just exists
– it can help to have “cookie-cutter” scripts that apply to anyone, for instance, but it’s also okay to acknowledge differences once in awhile – it sometimes just takes a brief
acknowledgement of human diversity to make someone feel seen.
- As an example, sometimes relationship articles will use a random hobby, pop-culture topic, or trait in their scripts (like “You like Fall Out Boy, too?”). It’d be nice to see example scripts like, “You’ve been watching Black-ish, right? How far along are you?” or, “There’s nothing wrong with being a short guy. Look at Danny DeVito.”
- @MissLunaRose
deserves a shoutout here for how diverse her artwork is, and she’s also written scripts on generic relationship articles where someone nonchalantly mentions queer relationships, autism, ADHD, blindness, use of canes/wheelchairs, and more. Unfortunately I can’t remember any specific examples off the top of my head, but it always makes me really happy whenever I stumble across those, because it’s not something I see elsewhere.
More content about relationships with people who are “different”
Something I really wish there was more of, and that I was hoping to do a little bit of work on before the GoogleMonster took this topic area away from us, is relationship content (familial, platonic, or otherwise) with people who are “different” somehow. My particular focus is neurodiversity (ADHD, NVLD, autism, etc.), but it can also apply to physical disability, queer identity, race, or even stuff like shyness, social awkwardness, high sensitivity, or other personality traits. In general, people tend to treat me differently based on my queer and disability status, and even when it’s well-intentioned, it’s very othering and weird; I think part of this comes down to there not being a lot of resources on interacting with someone outside of your “group.” And as someone who can pass for a “quirky” neurotypical, I’ve had a lot of strained relationships and falling-outs with people because of my disabilities, and I really wish I and others had known that even if what I did was hurtful, that didn’t mean I was being deliberately malicious. (On the flip side, it can also help with distinguishing “it’s something you can’t help” from “it’s something you can
help but don’t have the ability/skills to manage right now” from “you’re being a jerk and using XYZ as an excuse.”)
Caveat: having WRM work on these can be hit-or-miss because it’s not a guarantee that a given editor will have direct knowledge or experience with something. This can result in errors that straddle the line of being well-meaning, but inaccurate or offensive. It would be really critical to get feedback from people who really know the topic area well, and preferably have direct experience (and not just review from credentialed experts). I know the content team makes sure to check these things over, but if they’re not familiar with a topic either, it’s possible for things to slip through.
More empathy
I touched on this in my last post, but wanted to expand on it. We’re generally fairly good about empathy, but there’s some content where it feels like we’ve missed the mark and wouldn’t meet the reader where they’re at. This kind of spurns off into multiple “branches,” though, so bear with me:
- We need to be really sensitive with custom titles. If a serious topic gets a clickbaity custom title, it can easily come off as insensitive, because it seems detached from the severity of what the person is up against.
An example of how this can be insensitive: Deal with Gaslighting Parents
currently has a custom title of “How to Deal with Gaslighting Parents (Know Exactly What to Say or Do)”. Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse based around making the victim question their reality, so there’s no one exact way to handle it. What’s more, because of the nature of gaslighting and the fact that the readership probably skews younger, a supposed “perfect” response to gaslighting can be easily flipped on its head by an abuser and leave the reader confused, scared, or feeling worse than they did before. The clickbait in general feels inappropriate for a topic about abuse, and telling someone that we know exactly
what to say or do is making a promise that we can’t keep.
- The way you frame people’s actions is really
important, for two reasons:
- It can help the reader avoid black-and-white thinking or demonization, which is really common when you’re dealing with complicated or painful emotions. If someone’s angry at their friend for lying to them, and they read something saying that people only lie for their own gains, they might start viewing their friend as selfish, toxic, or even abusive. If they read multiple
reasons why people might lie, like as a form of self-protection or out of anxiety in addition to
gaining something from it, they might give their friend some more benefit of the doubt.
- “The other side” might be reading the article as well. It’s really common for people to frame lying, manipulation, or other “bad” actions as Inherently Evil Things Only Done By Bad People, but sometimes those things were maladaptive but necessary survival techniques (and in general, people don’t like to think of themselves or their loved ones as bad people). We can acknowledge that someone might have acted out of pain or fear and still acknowledge how painful their actions were to somebody else, and that what happened wasn’t okay.
There’s a really good example of this on the Expert Q&A of Stop Being Manipulative
: ”It’s not that we are purposefully manipulative in relationships. These patterns may have worked in your family system, and now you are unconsciously trying to apply the old rules. You have to learn what you’re unconsciously trying to express when you attempt to get what you want any way other than directly asking for it.”
- “Scripted” empathy can be hit-or-miss depending on how you frame it. Unfortunately I can’t really explain what the difference is, because I don’t know how to verbalize it, but I have noticed that depending on the writer, WRM’s attempts at empathy can feel very detached and clinical; it feels like they’re just saying “yep, it’s tough, and it’s normal to feel like that” without a broader understanding of what the reader is actually experiencing. To be clear, it’s not always like this – I’ve seen some genuinely empathetic WRM content, too. The “clinical empathy” risks being a problem, though, because it can feel very hollow and forced, and that can color someone’s view of the entire page.
- This probably comes back to content writers not always having direct experience with the topic. When I’ve done work on articles I don’t have direct experience with, I’ve generally found it helpful to “tap into” the closest possible emotion I can, and then write like I’m giving advice to my younger self or a close friend of mine.
- It really
helps to speak to where someone’s currently at sometimes. If someone is confused or hurting, it can be even more painful to try and put a positive spin on it or immediately tell them how to “fix” it, because it doesn’t acknowledge how they feel. Sometimes it’s not necessarily just the advice
they need, but the acknowledgement that what they’re going through hurts
, that it’s normal and okay, and that it will pass. (This is particularly important with younger readers, who tend to have less life experience, and readers going through really intense or deeply-rooted emotional pain.)
- At risk of seeming like I’m showing off, I’ve answered some Q&As along this vein, and readers have responded really
positively to them, so I’m going to include them as examples.
Q&A on "Stop Liking Your Crush"
Q&A on "Know if a Child is at Risk for Suicide"
(I know this one doesn’t seem to have a strong response. For some extra context: this Q&A currently isn’t visible to logged-out readers since it’s on a health article, and the ratings on questions like these tend to garner a pretty significant amount of Not Helpful votes regardless of what’s said. For every other Q&A on this page, the Helpful to Not Helpful ratio is 14:10, 16:9, 1:5, and 1:3.)
Fewer astrology articles
As someone who views astrology as “fun but pseudoscience,” I find them really hard to take seriously regardless of the content. Subsequently, I’m more likely to judge the site hosting the content as unreliable. And even taking my personal beliefs about astrology out of it, the content in general feels inherently exclusive; it’s often heavily gendered and focuses on romance, which leaves out people who are asexual, aromantic, and/or don’t fit into the gender binary.
Fewer blanket statements
Blanket statements, even when well-meaning, don’t always apply and can be invalidating or alienating. For example:
- “Your parents love you” can be invalidating or confusing to someone with abusive parents.
- In cases of more subtle abuse, the person might question whether their parents really are
abusive or if they’re just overreacting. This contributes to difficulties with recognizing unhealthy or toxic behavior, setting boundaries, or severing ties.
- If the person knows for sure that something is wrong – even if they’re not sure their parents are abusive – they might discount some or all of the article. (Saying “Your parents love you” to a younger reader who’s afraid to go home sometimes, or a reader who’s been disowned or explicitly told they’re unwanted, unloved, etc., makes it very clear to the reader that, at best, the writer doesn’t understand that they may genuinely
lack familial support.)
- In general, this kind of statement is really hard for someone who feels dismissed, rejected, or unloved by their parents, even if their parents do
love them. (As an example, if you’ve learned not to tell them anything that’s on your mind because they constantly blow it off as “not a big deal,” an article urging you to tell your parents something is going to make you feel alienated.)
- “Someone who only talks about themselves/their interests and never asks about you is selfish/using you/doesn’t care about you” might be true of neurotypical people, but this can be really common in neurodiversities like ADHD or autism, and it’s usually not a conscious thing. The person might just be excited about something or not realize the other person isn’t interested.
- From direct experience, too, it feels crappy to have unintentionally been that person and then read something like that. It feels like people are talking about you as though you aren’t right there
, but because these guides aren’t aimed at you, you don’t get any advice on what to do instead – and if you don’t know why you do it, taking it at face value and reading other articles (like Stop Being Selfish) just ends up being confusing, because you realize pretty quickly that that’s not right either. And while it’s absolutely possible for disabled people to be toxic or selfish and it’s good to remind yourself to be sensitive to others, hearing that kind of thing over and over again – particularly if you’re young and/or have experienced a lot of social rejection – can really wear down your self-esteem or make you wonder if you’re a bad person.
- Generally speaking, very broad and sweeping statements or advice fail to factor in nuance (and there’s a lot
of that in relationships), and it’s not always helpful – particularly to anyone who isn’t the “average reader.” And there are a lot of those.
There’s a really unfortunate example of this in action on Survive a Bad Breakup
; the entire article is riddled with this, but I’m looking specifically at list item 10: “Try not to take the breakup personally.” It uses the example of splitting up because you wanted to move when your ex didn’t. That’s a valid example, but there are other situations where this is not good advice: somebody cheated, your ex explicitly told you that something you did is the reason for the breakup, your ex is really good at making you feel guilty for things that aren’t your fault, et cetera. This isn’t acknowledged anywhere
, so if someone’s breakup is “bad” because their ex is emotionally abusive, the advice comes off as insensitive at best and invalidating at worst.
- What’s more, the definition of “bad” is so variable that this kind of broad advice doesn’t help those with a more severe definition of “bad.” The advice in Survive a Bad Breakup might work for someone who’s crying a lot and drunk-texting their ex, but it’s not going to work for someone who’s so shattered by the breakup that they can’t get out of bed and/or are contemplating hurting themselves.
Less use of “we”
This is a personal pet peeve, but I don’t like when articles say stuff like “we’re here to help” or “we know what you’re going through.”
- First off, to put it bluntly: in my personal experience, anyone who explicitly says “I know what you’re going through” usually doesn’t. Especially in advice articles, where the average reader has no idea who the author is and what their life is like, that’s more likely to evoke a response of, “How do you
know?”
- Second off, if I look at this from the perspective of a reader rather than an editor: I don’t know the content curators on 99% of websites, so use of “we” feels like I’m expected to trust a group of strangers with my emotions. That’s a level of vulnerability that not everyone is comfortable with. Some people look for advice online specifically because they don’t feel safe being that vulnerable with an actual person, and “we” forces them back into that dynamic.
Even from my perspective as an editor and former intern, where I know a significant portion of wikiHow staff, I’ve only felt comfortable asking for personal non-wiki advice in one-to-one settings. I’m not going to walk up to a group of staff members and say, “Y’know, I think I might be in a troubled relationship. Got any advice?”
Using list articles primarily for less-nuanced content
A lot of our content lately is in list format, and there’s some relationship content where that format works really well! There have been some other articles, though, where list format ends up “restricting” the article because it can’t factor in potential variables or alternatives, and it only ends up being helpful if your experience or question fits a narrowly-defined box – like in Survive a Bad Breakup. I find list format on relationship articles to be more helpful when there’s one main “framework” to achieve the main goal, or it’s more of a “checklist” of things to look for (rather than specific things to do or say); when there’s more variability in the reader’s scenario, or what you can or should do, Methods or Parts tends to work better because it allows for much more detail.
Full transparency, I wrote both of these articles – they’re just the first examples I could think of!
- Know if Someone Is Angry with You
lists multiple signs that someone is angry with you. Some may not apply to a given situation, but it’s okay to mentally skip over those, because it’s not really focused on telling the reader what to do
– just what to look for.
- Communicate with Your Spouse when You’re Angry
may have multiple ways to achieve the goal, but the framework is generally the same no matter what: communicate calmly, clearly, and respectfully, find mutual understanding, and try to work out a solution. There are situations where this might not work, but those would be more extreme cases, like abusive or dysfunctional relationships – and because this article focuses on communicating while the reader
is angry, it’s not as likely to net readers who are there to handle advice on their spouse’s
anger (which is more variable, and could range from “normal” anger to outright abuse).
Authoritative voice (don't emulate the audience)
When I’m looking for advice, I want advice from someone speaking relatively seriously and authoritatively, because I’m more likely to trust someone who sounds like they know what they’re talking about. Examples of what to say also tend to work better for me if they’re more serious, because they’re easier to adapt to who I’m talking to. Using emojis or attempting to emulate “generational” texting trends, like in this diff
, is impossible to take seriously, because it’s incredibly difficult to accurately capture the “voice” of your audience. Done poorly, something like that is worryingly likely to land us on something like r/fellowkids.
Memes, emojis, and trends can quickly become outdated, too, or develop meanings or connotations that they didn’t initially have. And these can be pretty serious shifts – Pepe the Frog was adopted by alt-right groups and white supremacists in less than a year. That’s a really extreme example, of course, but we don’t know what will gain hidden meanings, and it’d be pretty embarrassing to discover that a formerly-innocent emoji now has some kind of sexual connotation!
And this is subjective, but personally speaking, this is the kind of thing that would make me feel like my question wasn’t being taken seriously, or like the author doesn’t remember there’s a person asking the question. If I was a younger reader who came across Keep a Conversation Going with Your Crush, I wouldn’t feel able to use more than one or two of the suggestions, because none of them sound like anything I would have said and they’re not things I would’ve been able to adapt. Nor does it really answer how to keep the conversation going
, which is a genuine issue for me to this day (if I don’t know how to respond to something, I can falter or go silent, and the article doesn’t address what to do after opening the conversation or if you get a lukewarm response). It would’ve just felt like a list of icebreakers compiled into an article that’s overly focused on sounding “relatable,” not actual relevant advice.
Some of my feedback here might seem a bit harsh or critical – I promise I don’t intend it that way! This is me viewing this through the lens of a reader, and what I would want to see on any source if I was looking for relationship advice, so I want to be as thorough as possible. And I’m happy to elaborate on any points if need be, or find further examples
I have some minor thoughts related to the visual aspect of a separate section for relationships, too, but this post is long enough, and for something like that, I’d need to make wireframes or mockups to show what I mean anyway!
