Remember the neutral male pronoun? In case that sounds like jargon to you, let me provide an example:

If a student hopes to earn an A on his final report, he should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring his teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost his favoritism ratings.

While this is clearly objectively excellent advice, notice the consistently male pronouns. Am I writing to a class of only male students? Am I assuming that only the male students are required to perform brown-nosing acrobatics while the female students are naturally gifted enough to earn A’s on their own? Do only the male students care about their grades? This is so confusing!

The confusion is readily cleared once we recall that we’ve all been taught from a young age that the male pronoun is used to refer to people of all genders.

Well, since the dawn of the English language and the neutral male pronoun, a lot has changed in the realm of women’s recognition, political correctness and general 21^st century fun. Nowadays, in the majority of professional writing, the neutral male pronoun is no longer acceptable. Not only does it alienate your female audience, but it’s become so outdated that it can also be just plain distracting.

So what’s a writer to do? Let’s try a few tactics. Here we go!

Switch to female.

If a student hopes to earn an A on her final report, she should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring her teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost her favoritism ratings.

Well, now we’ve just got the same problem in reverse. While using the female pronoun does generally read as more progressive than using the male, it can still be distracting and you still run the risk of alienating half your readership.

Flip flop between the genders.

If a student hopes to earn an A on her final report, he should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring her teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost his favoritism ratings.

Is this student some species of fish that spontaneously alters its sex from one moment to the next? Let’s face it, this is even worse.

The only time it’s okay to flip flop is if you stick with one gender pronoun for an entire example/chapter/segment, and change to the other for the next one. Even so, switching around can still seem weird.

Use ‘one.’

If one hopes to earn an A on one’s final report, one should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring one’s teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost one’s favoritism ratings.

Unless you’ve got Dylan Thomas’s sultry voice and are reading 20^th century poetry or philosophizing, this one’s probably not going to cut it with your audience either.

Use ‘they.’

If a student hopes to earn an A on their final report, they should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring their teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost their favoritism ratings.

Well, there’s an idea. It still reads a little awkwardly and will likely annoy grammarians who can’t reconcile using a plural pronoun to refer to a singular entity, but ‘they’ has been used as a gender neutral singular pronoun by writers as far back as Shakespeare. Still, in a short passage like this one, the plural seems excessive.

Write ‘s/he.’

If a student hopes to earn an A on his/her final report, s/he should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring his/her teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost his/her favoritism ratings.

Aside from the fact that ‘s/he’ is impossible to pronounce if you’re reading aloud, you also run into the possessive adjective issue. Unfortunately, ‘his’ and ‘her’ don’t combine quite as conveniently.

Write ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her.’

If a student hopes to earn an A on his or her final report, he or she should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring his or her teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost his or her favoritism ratings.

Well, you’ve just boosted your word count significantly, which, depending on the writer/assignment, may be a good thing. (I’m looking at you, paid-per-word contractors.) But when overdone, it feels clunky.

Use the second person.

If you hope to earn an A on your final report, you should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring your teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost your favoritism ratings.

Wow! Surprisingly smooth, right? So this is a potential key to the puzzle, but some might not appreciate the personal and direct feel of the second person, which may not be appropriate in all contexts.

Use the passive voice.

If a student hopes to earn a final report on which an A is exhibited, not only should all the previous course material be studied, but the teacher should also be brought gifts, and various other tasks should be performed so that boosting may be done unto favoritism ratings.

Okay, I was having fun with that one. But you can see how using the passive voice can negate the need for a subject pronoun, yet doesn’t necessarily fix the possessive adjective problem. Sometimes, you can just drop the possessive adjective entirely; e.g., ‘favoritism ratings’ instead of ‘his/her favoritism ratings.’

Basically, solving the pronoun problem requires a combination of the above techniques and some writing intuition. Good writers should be able to reshuffle the wording a bit to bypass a lot of these problems arising in the first place while maintaining the meaning and tone of the original passage.

Give this version a shot:

Any student who hopes to earn an A on their final report should not only study all the previous course material, but also bring the relevant course teacher gifts and perform various other tasks that serve to boost his or her favoritism ratings.

What happened there? Well, I rephrased the first clause to change it from a first conditional clause to a simple statement. This took out the need for the second subject pronoun. Using a single ‘they’ or ‘their’ in one long sentence or passage flies under the radar so that we don’t really even notice when reading it. I also changed ‘teacher’ to ‘the relevant course teacher’ so that I could leave out a possessive adjective and have it feel natural, and in the end, I threw in one ‘his or her’ for good measure. Again, when used sparingly, we really don’t even notice wording that may seem clunky if used in excess.

So what have we learned today? In a nutshell, that the neutral male pronoun has, for the most part, seen the end of its days. While this may strike fear into hearts of timid writers stuck in their traditional ways, for the more adventurous, it means a breadth of possibilities, some of which may be more appealing than others and can require an artistic touch.

And there you have it: Not Alienating Your Readers 101.

Elizabeth Proctor is a writer and traveler who loves fishing, chess, camels and the X-Files.