pronouns

Solving the he/she his/her dilemma once and for all

Solving the he/she his/her dilemma once and for all

There’s a bug in the English language that has been driving non-fiction writers – including this ghostwriter – barmy for many years. That bug is the lack of a simple ‘third-person gender-neutral singular pronoun’. In plain English, there isn’t a single word that covers both ‘he’ and ‘she’, or both ‘his’ and ‘her’.

This is a problem when you are making a point that applies equally to males and females, as in:

“When a person wants to maintain his or her weight, the best way for him or her to do this is to eat a balanced diet and to make sure he or she gets plenty of exercise.”

Okay, that’s a bit clumsy, but you get the point. In a long document like a book or even a decent article or blog post, no matter how good the writing, this can quickly become unwieldy if not unreadable.

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