Words that make me go hmmm: Carer Last Monday me and Tricia Nicoll chatted for an hour with a group of people who had signed up to our online ‘Gloriously Ordinary Language: Keeping our language human, inclusive and real’ session ab…

*New blog post* Words that make me go hmmm: Carer

rewritingsocialcare.blog/2026/01/24/c...

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Words that make me go hmmm: Person-centred “A person-centred approach puts people at the heart of care.” “The person-centred approach treats each person as an individual human being” “A person-centred approach considers the w…

New blog post: Words that make me go hmmm: Person-centred

rewritingsocialcare.blog/2026/01/17/p...

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Letter to Bryony S Yesterday I received a direct message on Instagram from Maria. She said she hoped I didn’t mind her writing to me out of the blue, but that she was reading my book, and she wondered if she co…

*New blog post:* Letter to Bryony S

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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2025/09/21/l...

An image of Rewriting Social Care by Bryony Shannon. It’s a very pink book, on a background with images of daisies

Publication day!! 🌸

Info about the book and book launches at rewritingsocialcare.blog/2025/07/26/b...

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In image of a pink book by Bryony Shannon. Behind the book there’s a green background covered in daisies. The title of the book is Rewriting Social Care - Challenging and Changing Language and Practice for a Better, Brighter Future. There’s a quote from Elly Chapple, Founder, #FlipTheNarrative on the cover saying “What everyone in the social care space needs right now.”

One month until publication! 🌸

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#PreOrder

People with lived experience In my previous ‘What do we call them?’ post, I wrote about ‘people we support’ and ‘people who draw on care and support’ – two phrases that are increasingly replacing references to ‘service u…

We are all ‘people with lived experience’. But this phrase is fast becoming yet another a label to mean ‘them’.

*New blog post* - People with lived experience

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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2025/08/02/p...

What do we call them? As part of the Gloriously Ordinary Language programme I run with Tricia Nicoll, we spend a full day focusing on the language we use to communicate with and about people. We begin these se…

Service users. Customers. Clients. Cases. People we Support (PwS). People who draw on social care.

Why is it so hard for us just to talk about people? We? Us?

*New blog post* - What do we call them?
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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2025/07/06/t...

Words that make me go hmmm: Demand While many words make me go hmmm, there are some that make me squirm the most, either due to what they reflect about the way we think about people (like ‘case’ and ‘non-compliant’) or about the way…

Instead of all the conversations about ‘demand’, it’s time to demand a different conversation.

New blog post: Words that make me go hmmm: Demand

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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2025/05/17/d...

Changing the Story - Social Care Future

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#UsNotThemAndUs socialcarefuture.org.uk/changing-the...

Words that make me go hmmm: Special Often our language implies some people are different from the rest of ‘us’. Words like ‘disorder’, ‘deficit’ and ‘divergence’ suggest deviance from what, and who, is ordinary. One such term is ‘spe…

Often our language implies some people are different from the rest of ‘us’. One such term is ‘special’.

*New blog post*: Words that make me go hmmm: special

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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2024/11/02/s...

How to be human “We can talk about inclusion. We can talk about diversity. But what we really need to talk about is how to be human.” Elly Chapple [1] In their brilliant book about “learning how to make our social sy...

Following on from last week’s blog post about dehumanising and re-humanising language and practice here’s part two: how to be human.
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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2024/02/10/b...

Human I talk and write a lot about seeing people as human beings, about being human, and about how much of the way we currently work in the ‘human services’ is actually pretty inhumane. So, I thought it...

As Elly Chapple rightly says, ‘human’ is “a label we all share”. Yet many of the other labels we so liberally apply imply that older and disabled people are lesser human beings…

New blog: Human
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rewritingsocialcare.blog/2024/02/03/h...