He / She, They (Word Usage)

He / She, They

As we have seen throughout this series, errors in usage range on a wide continuum from the completely unacceptable to the virtually unnoticed, the former being the easiest to correct, the latter being largely unrecognized as mistakes. The use of "they" to create a plural where the singular "he" or "she" would be grammatically appropriate falls into the latter category, since it has become so commonly used in speech and increasingly popular even in writing, both formal and informal. This may be an example of a usage error that will in time become standard, but for now, your stricter English instructors will still pull out the red pen when they see examples of it on your papers and exams.

When you begin a sentence with a singular noun or pronoun, when you want to use a pronoun that refers back to it later in the sentence, a singular form is always appropriate, and putting a plural pronoun in its place is technically incorrect. Read the following example, and try to spot the error, paying close attention to the pronouns: "The teacher is the center of the classroom, though they are often isolated by their authority and their responsibility to discipline the students." Here, the subject of the sentence is "the teacher," which in this case refers not to any particular teacher, but rather to "teacher" taken as a category, considered in a more general and abstract way. Since this is a singular noun, any references to "teacher" throughout the sentence should also be in the singular. Therefore, "they," "their," and "their" in this sentence should be changed to the singular forms "he," "his," "his;" or "she," "her," and "her" to be considered grammatically correct.

Now, of course, we come to the reason why this common error has become so widespread, especially over the last 15-20 years. Substituting "he" in place of "they" poses no problem, nor does substituting "she" in place of "they." The problem has arisen in the wake of continued developments in the realm of feminist and gender theory, which suggest that using "he" to refer to an individual or category of individuals which encompasses both men and women, as was the common practice for many years, shows an unacceptable gender bias which must be corrected. As a result, some authors began using "she" exclusively in this case, while others opted for even more equalizing and inclusive constructions like "he or she," "he/she," or the interesting but not widely employed "(s)he" or "s/he." Since gender in English is considered "natural," meaning that only male and female things get assigned a gender in the language and its structures (unlike, say, French, where all nouns are either masculine or feminine regardless of whether they have any natural gender characteristics at all), the argument for inclusion was tenable, but it complicated certain constructions, and made them thoroughly unwieldy. For example, the example above properly written with gender considerations taken into account would look like this: "The teacher is the center of the classroom, though he or she is often isolated by his or her authority and his or her responsibility to discipline the students."

As a result of these awkward constructions, it became much easier, especially when speaking, to merely pluralize the pronouns, since English plural pronouns are gender-neutral. No one is likely to correct you if you use these forms in casual correspondence or conversation, but in formal writing, this error is likely to be pointed out. To avoid this problem, you can use the long gender-neutral constructions as shown above, or you can be a little craftier and instead change the opening noun to a plural form. So, in our example, "the teacher" becomes "teachers," and you can use the plural pronoun forms throughout the rest of the sentence.