He/She

[camoesjo]

Brian Clark writes today: "When a likely prospect swims along, if the writer’s aim is good and she gets enough power behind that harpoon, she can make the sale."

I believe this use of "she" instead of the traditional "he" is purely cultural and the idea is to have a well balanced text (number of "he" and "she") so you can avoid the "he/she" thing.

Am I right? Could you elaborate a little more? Are there specific/accepted rules (like "if the first person is a 'he' the second should be a 'she'")?

[Maeve]

Brian Clark writes today: "When a likely prospect swims along, if the writer’s aim is good and she gets enough power behind that harpoon, she can make the sale."

I believe this use of "she" instead of the traditional "he" is purely cultural and the idea is to have a well balanced text (number of "he" and "she") so you can avoid the "he/she" thing.

Am I right? Could you elaborate a little more? Are there specific/accepted rules (like "if the first person is a 'he' the second should be a 'she'")?

Brian,
I usually take the coward's way out and make all the subjects plural so that I can use "they" as the pronoun.

Ex. if the writers' aim is good and they get enough power behind that harpoon, they can make the sale."
(behind their harpoons?) Admittedly, this approach has its pitfalls.

You may be interested in this DWT article:
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/needed-new-singular-possessive-adjective-combining-his-and-her/

[TokeBernbole]

The fact of adding shes/hes or trying to balance, is a form of sexism. Most often I think a writer's persective and the context used will determine he/she. For example, I am a male, so therefore I often think in he perspective. I don't think political correctness should alter your writing unless the content has need for it. For example, an instructional piece may want a balance of he/she or as Maeve suggested an avoidance of either; using plural instances or other ways of avoiding a specific noun.

[Sound of Silence]

The majority of our nouns (e.g. writer's) don't have the word endings (suffixes) to suggest gender like many other languages (e.g. 'puella', Lating for girl, let's you know the word 'girl' is female by adding the suffix 'a' puell-a. The 'a' also tells you girl is the subject, if girl moved to say, object, 'am' would be added (puellam) if I remeber my Latin rightly)). So Languages Like Latin literally tell you the sex by the noun, the pronoun then naturally agrees with make/female/1st/2nd/3rd declension etc.

English doesn't have thaat. Our suffixes and prefixes aren'e gender relatad, so we run into a problem with our pronoun agreement. Do we write he/she/it...? In the end it just depends on the context. If people are gonna be offended, that's something you need to be aware of before you write (or when you come to edit). That's the biggest part, getting it right for the market you're writing for.

[Cecily]

I find the idea of alternating between "he" and "she" for fairness utterly bizarre, and always using "he" is almost as bad.

I have no hangups about using singular "they" in such circumstances. It was good enough for Jane Austen and we happily accept "you" as singular or plural. However, I've noticed on other international forums that it is more acceptable in BrE than AmE (perhaps influenced by our different approach to collective nouns).

The prohibition of singular "they" was invented by Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress who wrote a popular grammar book. It's time to ignore such a spurious "rule".