Be Your Own Editor

I’m back! Boy, have I been busy since my last post: adopting a child from Guatemala, ghostwriting a novel for a famous author who must remain unnamed, training for the Boston Marathon… Oh, fine. I’ve just been busy editing. (I knew no one would believe that last one.)

Back to business with an interesting question from Darlene:

How do you handle sentences that could apply to either gender when you’re writing for both? Do you use he or she (or him or her), or they (or their)?

For example: If you meet a stranger in a coffee shop, do you notice their (or his or her) smile?

There’s no one right answer, Darlene. But a little guidance and good sense will help you handle a tricky issue.

The Chicago Manual of Style, my most frequently consulted authority on such matters, dislikes the use of the plural possessive with a singular noun (in your example, “their smile”). Others, however, have come to view it as an acceptable alternative to the awkward but politically correct “his or her” or “his/her.” Even more acceptable is a sentence such as “When a person is thirsty, they take a drink,” because it doesn’t require juxtaposing the singular with the plural in the same way.

In cases where no hard-and-fast rule applies, and word usage is evolving as we speak (and write), we must make a judgment based on the context. I don’t know what you’re writing, but it seems this issue comes up more in nonfiction than in fiction—in fiction, a specific character is usually being discussed, while nonfiction is more likely to make generalizations about people. In nonfiction, it is less awkward to use “his or her” or “their,” because you don’t have to worry as much about distancing the reader from the story and characters.

I find “his or her,” and even worse, “he/she,” to be distracting and clunky in fiction. But I also cringe a little every time I see “they” or “their” in a singular construction (though its usage in speech has become so common that I cringe less when I see it in dialogue). Some writers alternate between the genders, but that can be just plain confusing. And the feminist in me, though she has chilled out since my college days, does wish there were some decent alternative to using “he” as the catch-all standard.

Problem is, the alternatives have the aforementioned problems of awkwardness, unwieldiness, and just plain grammatical incorrectness (which I consider a greater sin than political incorrectness). Whether you’re writing a piece in which this comes up frequently, or you just encountered it in one sentence and don’t know what to do, try first to recast the sentence to avoid the problem altogether.

Here’s an alternative for your example:

If you meet a stranger in a coffee shop, do you notice that stranger’s smile?

And another version of my own example:

A person’s thirst is usually quenched by a drink.

More interesting sentences, in the end, no? They won’t all be so easy to fix, but challenging yourself to reword sentences is a good way to get your writer’s mind to think outside the box, vary sentence structure more, and simply exercise its creative muscle.

If anyone has a particularly tricky example of this problem, leave it in the comments below and I’ll see what I can do to help!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.