Inclusive writing

When writing for Grafana Labs, always use inclusive terminology and phrasing. Avoid all statements that perpetuate gender, racial, or cultural stereotypes; do not use gendered words or demographically oriented terms that are irrelevant to the content.

Writing about people

When writing about people, be compassionate, inclusive, and respectful.

First and foremost, no matter the context, we always make sure to view people as people. When context and word count permits, we refer to them as people or people who maintain a particular area or discipline.

With that in mind, there are important distinctions between the ways that different people interact with our product and, thus, how we refer to those people.

Users are every person who uses our products, whether or not they use a commercial version of one of our products. Customers are people and companies who pay to use our products.
Visitors are people who visit our website for any reason, whether it’s as a potential user, customer, or employee. We appreciate all interest in our hard work.
Our customers (and users) often have their own customers (and users). Generally speaking, we refer to these customers of our customers as users, because it does an okay job of encapsulating all the ways our various customers might interact with the people using their products.
Employees are people who work at Grafana Labs.

Best practices

Consider the following best practices to ensure inclusivity in your writing.

Group or audience: Don’t refer to a group or audience as it. Instead, use they.
Age: Don’t refer to someone’s age unless it’s relevant. Don’t use age-related words to describe people. Avoid: young, old, or elderly.
Hearing: Do use the adjectives deaf, partially deaf, or hard of hearing when describing a person with hearing loss.
Vision: Do use the adjective blind or low vision when describing a person with limited vision.

Write for an international audience

Grafana Labs uses US English as our standard (for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and more). We write for an international audience with the following guidelines in mind:

Avoid acronyms

If you use an acronym, first write out each word in the acronym on first use, and then continue using just the acronym.

Example: Grafana Cloud is software as a service, also known as SaaS. Using SaaS typically requires setting up an account.

Avoid idioms

Understanding idioms typically requires cultural context. Users of Grafana Labs products and projects are all around the world, and many are non-native English speakers. Therefore, avoid idioms and idiomatic puns.

For example, some common American English idioms: