Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
As noted, I haven't read this month's book, but I am a self-proclaimed member of the grammar police.
In most cases, gender-specific pronouns can be avoided with a simple alteration or workaround. For example, instead of latepaul's "a person walking on ice should take care so that they don't slip," one can substitute "persons" for "a person" or write "A person walking on ice should be careful not to slip."
Same thing with gmw's examples; one can simply write "George should be careful not to slip." No pronoun needed. Of course, in that example there's no special reason to avoid the male pronoun, unless one isn't sure if George is male or female (e.g., George Fayne in the Nancy Drew books).
I've read some suspense novels over the years that have deliberately concealed the gender of a character (usually the villain of the piece) by avoiding pronouns. Wendy Corsi Staub has done it more than once in her novels, and quite skillfully has led the reader to believe the villain is male and then sprung the surprise that the unsuspected female is actually the villain--or vice versa.
There's rarely a need to use "he or she" or "s/he"; there's no excuse to use "they" as a singular--that's just plain WRONG.
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Grammar Girl also did a nice article summarizing all the ways the various style manuals are dealing with this issue.
Having said that, the gender thing isn't what put me off at the end of the day. Rather, the pacing and the lack of character depth got me.