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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.women
Subject: Re: Pronouns devoid of gender connotations
Message-ID: <1609@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Jul-85 13:57:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.1609
Posted: Mon Jul  1 13:57:06 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Jul-85 16:15:55 EDT
References: <2718@decwrl.UUCP> <498@rtech.UUCP> 
Reply-To: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 31
Summary: 


>7)  Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to
>    another, or from one passage to another.
>
>   So far as I know, this suggestion was first publicly aired by J. D.
>McCawley in a review of Robin Lakoff's _Language_and_Woman's_Place_ (1975).
>I had never seen it actually carried out in anything like strict alternation
>until last week.  The book that I stumbled upon which appears to do this
>(the author doesn't make a big point of it in a note or anything) is
>_The_Nature_of_Mathematical_Knowledge_ by Philip Kitcher (Oxford U.P.
>1984).  He switches back and forth like clockwork, with only one exception
>that I've noticed so far.  I mean each passage or example, not each instance
>of a pronoun....

This was the solution my wife and I adopted in our "Psychology of Reading"
(Academic Press, 1983), over the objections of the copy-editor, who wanted
"he or she".  We prevailed, because we felt strongly that "he or she" was
very clumsy in practice.  When the referent remained the same (real or
abstract) person throughout a passage, the pronoun remained consistent.
When the referent changed, so might the pronoun.  Only where the sex of
the referent was absolutely or probabilistically determined would the
pronoun be fixed in advance (We did not refer to a dyslexic child as
"she" unless we wanted to point out an exception to the general rule that
most dyslexic children are male).  It is very easy to get used to the
generic "she", but I think it is better to balance "she" and "he" through
a text.
-- 

Martin Taylor
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