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Subject:Re. Alternating he and she in examples? From:Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Fri, 22 Dec 1995 16:05:29 LCL
One suggestion to avoid "he" only examples is to alternate
"he and "she" in your examples. I don't much like this for
two reasons: it's painfully obvious what you're doing, at
least to me, and if you add an example out of the blue (has
this ever happened to you?), you have to go back and
re-alternate (!) all your examples.
Here's a better solution, which I saw for the first time in
a recent issue of Byte magazine (didn't write down the
author, unfortunately): use gender-indeterminate proper
names! Examples: Chris, Lee, Jan, Jean, etc. Thus, each
example could be either masculine or feminine, depending on
the reader's taste.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of our
reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.
