the grammar nazi - part ii

My little observation today is about personal pronouns, you know that fun stuff you stay up late at night ruminating over and over again in your mind.

In our age of political correctness, it is no longer appropriate to use the third personal pronoun "he" or "his" when referring to a singular subject of an unspecified gender. For example, it would be inappropriate to write "A teacher should consider all of the learning styles of the students in his class when preparing a lesson." Current convention dictates that this statement should read, "A teacher should consider all the learning styles of the students in his or her class when preparing a lesson."

This is simple enough when you are writing one or two sentences, but it gets extraordinarily redundant when you are trying to write a lengthy paper from an "objective" point of view and you are constantly typing out the phrase "his or her" every time a generic third person pronoun is needed. Some have suggested that interchanging "he" and "her" or "his" and "her" throughout a paper addresses this issue, but I am not so sure. On one hand it makes the work smoother to read, but I believe it draws too much attention away from the subject of the paper and places it onto the subject of political correctness. When I read a paper that uses the technique of "interchanging the pronouns" I can't help but count the number of times the masculine and feminine pronouns are used to see how "balanced" the writing is. This simply will not do.

I am not suggesting that we go back to the days of using the pronoun "he" all the time, I would suggest - at least suggest that we consider - something far more radical. Instead of writing "he or she" or interchanging "he" and "she" throughout a work, I think we should start using "their" as a gender neutral singular pronoun. Thus, my above example would read, "A teacher should consider all of the learning styles of the students in their class when preparing a lesson." Currently, this is one of the biggest grammar foibles a student can make, because "their" is exclusively a plural pronoun.

People use "their" as a singular pronoun in spoken English all the time, but in written English it has not been accepted. Perhaps this is the answer to the redundant "his or her" statements that are found throughout academic writing, or perhaps this suggestion opens up a Pandora’s Box, making it unsafe for all the grammatical rules we love and hold dear to our hearts.