On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:35 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <kurt@thepaw.org> wrote:

> Stay with the traditional methods and don't get cutsey and try to be
> politically correct/neutral.  Nothing aggravates me more than to be reading
> a manual (game book, technical manual, or something else) where they jump
> back and forth between masculine and feminine or try to go a different route
> and be cute and go some PC route.  In those cases my tolerance drops to
> almost nil and unless the material is outstanding in every other way, I tend
> to get very critical and often lose interest.

 Eh.  Kurt, that sounds more like a case of your own interalized
gender bias, than a critique of literary technique.

Oddly enough, this discussion came up yesterday, in a different venue,
same topic:  someone writing a manual and looking for pronouns.

In general, third person plural (they/them/their) is neuter and makes
an adequate susbsititute for gendered third person singular pronouns.
That's been happening since at least Shakespeare.

You could also use descriptive role-name nouns (buyer, seller,
designer, etc) rather than pronouns when possible.

Dan

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan