Grammar Rodeo: Pronouns for Pros
Looking for grammar mistakes on websites is a finicky exercise. I don’t go out of my way, but sometimes they find me. In a story about allegations of sexism at The Daily Show, Alex Leo writes:
The response from the women of the “Daily Show” reads as earnest and heartfelt, but if one of these women did feel the environment was hostile, it would be difficult for them to speak up without jeopardizing their career.
The problem here, of course, is the singular “they”. This common mistake is generally found in situations in which the sex of the subject or object of the sentence is unknown: “I don’t know who my new teacher will be, but I hope they are nice”. The singular “they” is a self-conscious and incorrect effort to avoid sexist language. But in the excerpt above the sex of the subject is explicitly noted, and given the theme of this story, it is odd to find such an error. Leo should have written, “…it would be difficult for her to speak up without jeopardizing her career”. (A good writing teacher would also have a problem with the vague pronoun reference of “it would be difficult”, since “it” doesn’t appear to refer to anything. You may have noticed that I don’t worry much about that.)
Until the otherwise genderless English language invents a neuter pronoun (besides “it”), this problem will persist. One correct way to form my example sentence above would be to simply pick “he”, even if the teacher may be female. Alternatively, one could write “he or she”, though that sometimes leads to wordy constructions. My writing teacher, Professor McCrea, would advise students whenever possible to “make … nouns that refer to general classes plural and then replace those nouns with the plural (and sexually neutral) pronoun they“. In that case, Leo would need only to eliminate the words “one of”, and change “career” to “careers”. But Professor McCrea would agree with me that Leo’s sentence does not allow this without altering the meaning. The danger of one woman speaking out is central to Leo’s message.
Meanwhile, don’t bother searching for grammatical errors on my webpage; I promise there are more than a few. I am not a professional writer.
Filed under: Rantings on July 6th, 2010 | No Comments »