What’s wrong with this message, one that goes out to WordPress bloggers thousands of times a day?
No, the answer is not “Jay P. Johnson has poor taste in blogs.” The problem involves agreement. Jay is one person, or singular in grammar lingo. Their is plural. The two words don’t agree.
Reaching agreement is hard in business and in life, and sometimes it’s even harder for writers to get nouns and pronouns to agree. Fortunately, many people miss agreement errors anyway, so no one may notice that you slipped up and wrote they instead of it. But grammar-savvy people all agree: Right is better.
The main problem with pronoun reference comes from a longstanding rule. For centuries, grammar books insisted that the gender of any indefinite subject was male. However, most modern employees would not want to risk the wrath of their female counterparts by writing this:
A good business executive should hone his computer skills.
Obviously, business executives can be male or female, but technically, the pesky rule said to refer to them all as men. So people started indiscriminately using their to solve the problem. However, in many situations the word is incorrect.
Current grammar books suggest working around the rule to avoid sexism. Here are a few techniques:
1. Use plurals because plural references have no gender.
Good business executives should hone their computer skills.
2. Use both a masculine and feminine pronoun.
A good business executive should hone his or her computer skills.
3. Use a slash.
A good business executive should hone his/her computer skills.
This technique gets awkward, so use it sparingly. Another hybrid that’s popping up is s/he, which goes beyond awkward. Please avoid it so it doesn’t catch on and become acceptable!
4. Mix and match throughout the document.
A good business executive should hone his computer skills.
A company president should remember her responsibilities to her employees.
The mix-and-match method is tricky. Some nonfiction books will use female references in one chapter and male references in the next in an attempt to be fair and consistent at the same time, but in the end this method will feel inconsistent at some level.
5. Rewrite the sentence.
Computer skills are vital for today’s business executive.
One singular sensation
Probably the most common violation of proper pronoun agreement is using the word they, a plural pronoun, to refer back to collective nouns. Collective nouns name a group acting as a single unit and are supposed to take singular pronouns:
The committee presented its findings.
The jury announced its verdict.
Because groups and corporations are run by many people, writers tend to think of those entities in terms of people, a plural concept, instead of the proper singular perspective:
WRONG: Wal-Mart has been in the news because of their business practices.
RIGHT: Wal-Mart has been in the news because of its business practices.
WRONG: Dunkin’ Donuts released their financial report.
RIGHT: Dunkin’ Donuts released its financial report.
Next time: How the Miami Heat upset the grammar world
Thank you yet again. I take great pleasure from your blog.
If English is a living language I’m wondering what your scholarly argument would be against letting the language grow in this direction?
I appreciate your ongoing support of my blog!
I have no problem with the language evolving. However, I think the s/he construction is an awkward solution to the agreement problem. It’s not really a word, more like a hybrid that I stumble over when I come across it. Of course, that’s purely a personal argument, not an academic one.
I believe that s/he is actually quite elegant as a solution to the gender problem. Both she and he take the same verbal forms, so it is easy to say “S/he talks overlong at business meetings.” I do agree with your point that all of these solutions can become cumbersome and take attention from the actual message, though. Anyhow, I appreciate the dedication you have for your blog, and for describing, sometimes prescribing, the English language.
As for your other commentor’s query; if the scholar is meant to educate the rest of society, then it is our job to let others know when their grammatical usage is unacceptable. This would be in the realm of an English Teacher. An Applied Linguist would, on the other hand, simply observe and make note of the changes as they happen. I fall somewhere between the two, and have certain changes that I find abhorrent (“irregardless,” “Dunkin’ Donuts released their financial report,” “Welcome to the United State’s”), and choose to fight rather than simply watching them happen.
Perhaps if I see s/he enough times, I won’t stumble over it and consider it a detraction to communication. However, the slash creates a second issue: how is the “word” pronounced if the document is read aloud? If the solution is to read it as she/he, it would be better just to write the words out.
A postscript: In reading the Chicago Manual of Style for another post, I came across this: “Employing an artificial form such as s/he is distracting at best, and most readers find it ridiculous.”
I don’t love the S/he, but on the other hand I didn’t like the title “Ms.” when I first saw it. Now it is used on many documents as a choice for women’s titles.
Ronnie
Yes, I thought “Ms.” looked a little strange at first. I will have to live with whatever ends up in the grammar books, but if I can use my blog to vote against the s/he choice, I’m going to do it!
Thanks for a good write-up on the his/her/its/their problem. However, there are some cases in which it is correct to use a plural pronoun when the antecedent is a group noun such as ‘committee’ – and that is when the members of the group are acting independently of one another. For example: The committee cast their votes on the recommendations. [Because each individual member cast a discrete vote] BUT: The committee issued its final recommendations. [Because, having voted on those recommendations, the committee as a whole is now issuing those recommendations upon which they agreed.] However, from a practical standpoint, this can confuse many readers (not to mention the writers), so it’s best to agree to use the plural with ‘committee’ but when individual members act independently of one another, use ‘committee members’ instead of ‘committee.’
Yes, I was going to go into detail on that issue, but the situation is rare, and most people handle it as you mentioned, by saying “team members” or “jury members,” which is a smoother resolution anyway.
I agree that recasting the sentence is often a good solution, but revising to “Computer skills are vital for today’s business executive” is a poor substitute. “A good business executive hones…” is an active, personal directive, almost a call to action. “Computer skills are vital…” is bland and general – what we in newspapers used to call a “no-shit lead.”
You can get around this by eliminating personal pronouns altogether:
A good business executive hones the computer skills needed to perform everyday tasks.
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Ronnie
Thanks for your support!
Thanks for fighting the good fight for pronoun agreement!
Great post. But regarding the specific case of disagreement you cite (WordPress’s awkward subscription notice) I think it is less a case of bad grammar and more one of inadequate — or perhaps intentionally non-invasive — technology. When the person subscribes, there’s no field or box in which to state gender, which is probably as it should be, and likewise the system does not deploy any kind of algorithm to detect gender in the subscriber’s name or other information. So it defaults to or has no alternative to “their.” You’ll find similar cases in Facebook notifications. But, looking again at your opening example, a solution seems fairly simple: insert the subscriber’s name (i.e. “jaypjohnson”) where “their” and “they” appear now. Obviously, an apostrophic “s” would be added in the first instance. I believe this is completely doable, technologically speaking. Granted, the overall effect is somewhat repetitive, but not without warmth and even a bit of charm.
Yes, I’ve noticed the same thing on Facebook with regard to announcements about the latest accomplishments on someone’s farm in Farmville. I don’t think it would take extensive programming to add the possessive name as you suggest or replace “their” with “his or her.”