But there’s no denying that expanding the They franchise will necessarily increase ambiguity by slurring two well-worn axes of distinction (he/she & singular/plural). By no means would this be the end of the world, but it will require some compensating efforts in other areas to maintain clarity, perhaps by relying more on proper nouns and less on pronouns.
I believe the psychological perception of others by gender, and the ‘defaultness’ of the notion of gender in humans, cause(d) more bad than good (at least when discluding the evolutionary era). This motivated me to switch to using the non-gendering pronoun ‘they’ for almost[1] everyone.
I haven’t found my use of ‘they’ by default to require nontrivial compensation to maintain clarity. Any ambiguity introduced in a draft is removed by one of the simple checks I try to run across all of my writing for others: if referent of a word (namely 'that', 'this', 'it', or 'they') is unclear : replace with direct referent word or rephrase to remove unclarity.
Also, I think this helps match the reader’s interpretation to my intended meaning. Among humans, a being’s ‘gender’ has a lot of connotative meaning. I think not introducing those connotations is instrumental to eliminating unintended ways my text could be interpreted, which in my experience is the real difficulty with writing.
I believe the psychological perception of others by gender, and the ‘defaultness’ of the notion of gender in humans, cause(d) more bad than good (at least when discluding the evolutionary era). This motivated me to switch to using the non-gendering pronoun ‘they’ for almost[1] everyone.
I haven’t found my use of ‘they’ by default to require nontrivial compensation to maintain clarity. Any ambiguity introduced in a draft is removed by one of the simple checks I try to run across all of my writing for others:
if referent of a word (namely 'that', 'this', 'it', or 'they') is unclear : replace with direct referent word or rephrase to remove unclarity.Also, I think this helps match the reader’s interpretation to my intended meaning. Among humans, a being’s ‘gender’ has a lot of connotative meaning. I think not introducing those connotations is instrumental to eliminating unintended ways my text could be interpreted, which in my experience is the real difficulty with writing.
excepting beings who this would harm
and excepting some contexts where I expect some readers might be confused by singular they