Dear Geist,

Should I hire a sensitivity reader to vet my YA novel manuscript? Two of my characters are a sixteen-year-old filipina who just moved to Canada with her parents, and a teacher who uses a wheelchair because of a spinal cord injury. I'm not in either category, but I've done a lot of research.

—Jodi M, Toronto ON

Dear Jodi,

First, a bit of background on sensitivity readers, for readers new to the term. A sensitivity reader is a person hired to read a text—book manuscript, story, speech, script or other text—with an eye to accuracy. This reader has firsthand or close experience of a particular situation, such as age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, body type, socioeconomic situation; and/or experience such as bullying, sexual assault, incarceration, injury or chronic illness.

The reader is an editor, a specialist in language having to do with one or more of these conditions, and is hired by a writer or publisher to read a text and suggest revisions to strengthen it. This includes pointing out errors of fact, misapprehensions and stereotypes, much as other expert readers, such as lawyers, psychologists, economists and forensic criminologists, read fiction or non-fiction text to make sure it is accurate.

Much of the recent interest in sensitivity readers has come from writers and publishers of children’s and young adult books. There's a growing demand for up-to-date content relevant to a diverse young audience—on the part of young people themselves as well as the parents, teachers, librarians and other grownups who spend hours a day with kids and purchase most children's and YA books.

There's also plenty of fervent opposition to sensitivity readers, and accusations of censorship. If you search “sensitivity reader,” you’ll see tales of writers who are grateful to have worked with a reader, writers who are furious that their publishers hired readers and pressured them to revise their text, established writers who say non-mainstream writers should back off and write their own books and open their own publishing companies, and so on.

So, Jodi, we appreciate this opportunity to mention an important aspect of writing and publishing, although we don't have a yes-or-no piece of advice for you. If you have an agent and/or publisher, ask them what they think. And ask your writing and publishing colleagues, who are always a thorough, up-to-date source. We also recommend that you search “sensitivity reader” online and ponder the many points of view—it's provocative reading that everyone in writing and publishing ought to consider. A starting place we can recommend: articles, transcribed talks and a cogent Twitter feed by Dhonielle Clayton, an American writer and experienced sensitivity reader (@brownbookworm). Clayton is clear on the practice of sensitivity reading and on the larger issues raised by it. For instance, a few months ago she tweeted that “the reason I’ve done over 35 sensitivity reads this year alone is b/c publishers aren’t hiring black content creators but everyone wants to write about black people.”

The website Writing in the Margins maintained an online database of sensitivity readers for a couple of years, but it has been taken down, and we haven't come across any others.

—The Editors