Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Avoiding emotive language

We'll move on to another example, this time about *emotive language*. So here is the beginning of the Wikipedia article about *genocide*. Genocide! Genocide is terrible. I trust absolutely everyone on this call agrees that genocide is terrible. It's one of the most horrific things human beings are capable of. And yet, if you read the Wikipedia article on genocide, you would not see the word "terrible". You would not see Wikipedia share an emotional opinion about it.

Instead, what *does* Wikipedia say about genocide? It *defines* it, for one. It says genocide is "intentional action to destroy a people, ethnic, national, racial or religious group in whole or in part". It gives the etymology of the word, specifying that it's coming from Greek and Latin. "The United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948 defines it as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, etc.". Okay, that's the definition.

Then the second paragraph says that the term "was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book". "It has been applied to the Holocaust and to many other mass killings, including indigenous peoples in the Americas, Armenian Genocide, the Rwanda genocide". So it shows us how this term is applied to certain events in history.

And the third paragraph reminds us, the readers, that this isn't something that took place long ago: "Between 1956 and 2016, a total of 43 genocides took place, causing the death of about 50 million people, and the UN estimates that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence."

Okay, we were given facts, a definition, a history of the term, what it has been applied to, and some statistics, some information from reliable sources about the fact that it's still happening. But we were *not* told: "it's terrible", Right? That's left for us as readers, as humans, to think and feel. But *Wikipedia* does not tell us genocide is the *terrible* act of killing, of mass killing a people. It does not say that.

Okay, you see how this was a *factual* description of an absolutely *horrifying* phenomenon *without* using emotive language. You can also read articles on topics like, for example, *female genital mutilation* -- another horrifying practice, in my opinion. But *Wikipedia* will not tell you "it's a horrifying practice". It will tell you it is a practice. It will tell you the cultures in which it is practiced. It will tell you the medical implications of it, the psychological implications of it. It would talk about the efforts to stop it. It would talk about the arguments in *favor* of practicing it. It will not tell you *how to feel* about it.

Wikipedia avoids emotive language, and instead gives information and cites sources and describes causes and consequences of the phenomenon.