Re: manual style

[Heikki Johannes Junes]

On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 18:34:51 -0400 Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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].
> > 
>
> 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.

The Oxford English Grammar (1996) by Sidney Greenbaum suggests to use generic
singulars they, them, their:

[4] This certificate lists the four courses for which the student was
    registered, showing letter grade assessments of their work over the 
    year and grades for their examination performance.

Or to write throughout in plural: "Students ... their ...".

Or to avoid using pronoun forms: "Every student is allocated a tutor, who ...",
by omitting object pronouns and possessive pronouns.

The Grammar deals also with cases "he or she", "his or her", "s/he", 
"him/her", "his/her", "his or her". It also states that 

 "Some writes -- usually women writers -- have employed a mixture of
  strategems, including the use of she a generic."

In Finnish language we refer genderlessly to the 3rd person, and have not such
confusions. But, why not write directly to the LilyPond user ("you") and 
not to the person who reads about a composer/user who uses LilyPond:

Instead of

"A composer might want to do foo, so she should write bar in her LilyPond score"

you would write

"If you want to do foo, you should write bar in your LilyPond score".

Greetings,

  Heikki Junes