Re: manual style

[Carl Sorensen]

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 20:21, Graham Percival wrote:

> - Current English academic[1] writing style is to use the feminine 
> pronoun as a gender-neutral pronoun.  "A composer might want to do foo, 
> so she should write bar in her LilyPond score".  Yes, in the past[2] 
> English used the male pronoun for non-gender specific texts (ie replace 
> "she" with "he" and "her" with "his" in the above example).  I've 
> changed such occurrences in the manual to reflect this[3].
> 
> If you're talking about a specific person (Chopin, Han-Wen, etc) then 
> you still use the appropriate pronoun.
> 
> [1]  I mean university-level.
> [2]  I think it started to change about thirty years ago, and hasn't 
> become widespread until this decade.
> [3]  I personally think it's a ridiculous fad, but we _do_ want to be 
> stylish, don't we?  :)


Current American university-level academic style allows, but does not
require, the replacement of male pronouns with female pronouns.  It's
hard for me to see how replacing one sexist set of pronouns (male) with
another sexist set (female) makes anything better.

OTOH, it would be far worse to use his/her or (s)he constructions, which
are completely awkward.  And it's only marginally better to rewrite
everything in a genderless manner.  ("When one wants to do foo, one
should put bar in one's lilypond score."  or "Composers who want do do
foo should put bar in their lilypond scores.")

My personal preference would be to use male pronouns and female pronouns
in alternating chapters, but I'm not strident enough about it to
complain if you, as the Docmeister, choose to make all
non-gender-specific pronouns female.

Carl Sorensen