The first approach is closest to what I learned in grade school. If I
said "a person could make his claim" the assumption was that we didn't
know or care whether "a person" was a he or a she.
But in the interest of gender sensitivity, we started writing "a
person could make his or her claim." As a writer, I balk at that as
unnecessarily awkward. I understand -- and, in fact, agree with -- the
claim to the contrary, I just don't agree with where the claim took us.
As a journalist, I also have a problem with option 2. There is too
much opportunity to confuse the reader about whether I'm writing about a
he or a she.
Assuming I was thinking about it as I wrote, which when I'm writing
for print I try harder to do than when I'm informally chatting, I would
prefer "a person could make a claim." In fact, that may be the answer to
Jeffrey's "one word" query. In fact, English offers no neuter gender
(though some languages do -- I think I remember the whole concept from
high school Latin). I submit replacing the personal pronoun with the
article is the smoothest solution to making readable writing.
Craig Froehle wrote:
> On 6/1/07, Jeffrey Kaplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> Someone said:
>>
>>> REALLY? To me
>>> "the person who"
>>> must be a he or a she; "it" does not make it nor does THEIR!!!! Clue:
>>> person is singular.
>>>
>> Then please educate me on the proper genderless indication of singular
>> ownership in one word or less.
>>
>>
>
>
> What person do you know is without a gender? When talking about individual
> _people_ (at least in English; I don't want to generalize beyond my
> familiarity), one should always specify a gender.
>
> With that said, there are different approaches:
> 1) Use "his" when referring to a person not believed/assumed to be female
> 2) Alternate "his" and "her" (apparently to show some sensitivity to
> diversity)
> 3) Use "his/her" or "his or her" (although this has fallen out of fashion in
> favor of #1 above)
>
> If you follow one of those rules consistently, you leave little opportunity
> for well-founded criticism.
>
> With that said, using "their" when "his" should be used is pretty far down
> my personal list of grammatical grievances. :-)
> - Craig
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
--
/The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless -- to us -- if we
know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us
whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of
chow mein. We grieve only for what we know./
A Sand County Almanac, /Aldo Leopold, July 1949/
