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My first technical writing position began with updating and revising a
software manual that my predecessor, a somewhat overenthusiastic feminist,
had written entirely in the feminine: the user was uniformly "she." My next
position was with an all-male engineering firm, where my first task was
rewriting jargon-laden manuals that were equally consistent in their use of
the generic masculine. One was as distracting and irritating as the other.
Speaking out of that experience: to me it's not a question of political
correctness. It's simple acceptance of a fact: today's workforce includes
both sexes. Our dynamic language, which changes to accommodate technology,
the arts, the sciences, and just about any other influence, should surely be
able to accommodate this. When Rule #1 of technical writing is to consider
the audience's perspective, avoiding stylistic quirks that will confuse,
distract or offend, it would seem to me that holding to a contrived and
outdated single-sex "generic" is ill-advised to say the least.
The challenge for me, personally, is to see how unobtrusively
gender-neutrality can be made an invisible presence in my manuals. If it's
at all apparent that I'm being gender-neutral -- i.e., if the manual is
distractingly PC -- I'm doing something wrong. There are so blinkin' many
ways to write around the issue in such a way that the reader never even
notices it.
My hat's off to Chris Kowalchuk, Nancy Kaminski, Geoff Hart, Rahel Anne
Bailie, and Suzette Severny for particularly elegant workarounds.
Philomena Hoopes
Phila -at- vips -dot- com <mailto:Phila -at- vips -dot- com>
VIPS Healthcare Information Solutions, Inc.
(410) 832-8330 ext 845
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Stockman [mailto:stockman -at- JAGUNET -dot- COM]
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 1999 10:09 AM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: Re: Gender-specific pronouns
The solution I've always liked (outside of simply re-writing
to avoid
pronouns altogether) is to mix-and-match pronouns within the
text, trying
to keep a decent balance. For example, in one "hypothetical
user"
example, refer to the user as feminine throughout, and in
another example
switch to masculine.
The advantage there is that you can't possibly offend
anybody, you don't
have to re-write into awkward constructions simply to avoid
a pronoun,
and you don't have to make up any words (which seems to be
an issue in
this forum).
The only complaint I've ever gotten from clients is that it
was that a
sentence using the feminine pronouns interrupted the reading
flow because
it was such a surprise, but I'm certain that would wear off
with
additional reading, to everyone's benefit.
>This *really* bothers the linguistic purist in me, but
>my real problem is that when I complained about it, I
>could not come up with an acceptable counteroffer.
>Does anyone have any suggestions for a
>non-gender-specific pronoun set that *also* delineates
>between plural and singular?
