Jeni's Musings

I just disagree with this. People who write “writing style guides” are not necessarily right; always have their own ideological positions and personal histories despite any pretensions to independence; and usually represent a traditional approach. It is not feasible to use “the user”, for example, all the time, as in “If the user does this, the user will find…”: the second and subsequent occurrences have to be replaced with a pronoun or the writing is incredibly stilted. Choice of he or she in this position is feasible, but necessarily conveys some gender implication. To many ears, “they” (and where needed “their” and similar things) sounds good; has a freshness of approach; and implies the writer has thought about things and wants to be gender-neutral; and is much less awkward that “she or he” or “he or she”. The use of “they” is increasingly common in spoken language, especially among women. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary records this usage as LME (Late Middle English) and gives a good example with the pronoun referring back to the noun “anybody”. Wikipedia gives examples from Shakespeare and Thackeray, as well as noting some prescriptive cautions against. To me, a sentence like “The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work” sounds perfectly natural, and I strongly encourage others to follow this practice.