Some feedback from readers of Copy Editor: The National Newsletter for Professional Copy Editors. Readers were asked simply, "What has been your biggest change in style or usage this year?" The replies appeared in the December 1994/January 1995 issue.

Jack Vaughn, copy and slot editor, The Sacramento Bee:

When we had the Mexican Chiapas uprising, readers objected to the phrase peasant uprising or peasant rebellion. So we banned peasant, changing it to rural or another more specific word. The thought was that (a) peasant is a word that has a pejorative meaning as well as a literal one and that (b) it's not very specific....

Pamela Dugan, copy desk chief, The San Diego Union-Tribune:

Our official style is still to use American Indian, but we'll allow Native American when a person prefers it. We make allowances for people's stated preferences with, for example, Hispanic or Latino and black or African American, and American Indian and Native American seem to be in that category.

Kimberly Travis, copy editor, Endless Vacation magazine:

We've changed Native American to American Indian. We wanted to be accurate and correct and still get to the point.

Caesar Andrews, executive editor, Rockland Journal-News (West Nyack, N.Y.):

We're trying to clarify Hispanic and make the distinction that as a Hispanic you can be black or white. That does not always come across clearly in population and demographic-type stories. Where it's appropriate, we don't presume that there's a black and a white and a Hispanic. We're in the process of figuring out how to deal with this issue and do it in an accurate sense that is not too convoluted.

Charlotte Wiggers, managing editor, Essence:

We had been capping black and lowercasing white, and now we are uppercasing white as well. If you do it for one, you need to do it for the other.

Peter Jeffrey, copy chief, Working Woman:

Over the past years we have formalized what had already been a tendency to blend African-American with our use of black. We use African-American on first reference and black thereafter, so as to acknowledge African-American without replacing black. We felt that African-American was gaining currency and had a lot of etymological legitimacy, but since it's rather long and it can be awkward when used exclusively, we decided to mix the two forms.

Bill Fink, copy desk chief, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

We never used to allow the term African American, for most of the usual arguments. Now we have an informal policy of using black and African American pretty much interchangeably. We usually go with what the source that's covered prefers.

Darrell Turner, copy editor, the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette:

We no longer use the term the disabled. We now say people with disabilities.

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