Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] CodingGuidelines: recommend singular they

From: Felipe Contreras <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2021 20:47:22 -0500

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 07 2021, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

> > If the reader does not consider that pronoun to apply to them,
> > then they can experience cognitive dissonance that removes focus from
> > the information. [...]
> > When choosing a gendered pronoun, that pronoun no longer applies to
> > nearly half of possible readers. Even if we alternated between "he/him"
> > and "she/her" perfectly evenly, we would still expect male and female
> > readers to experience an incorrect pronoun half the time. However, some
> > readers will not prescribe to either of these binary genders. Those
> > readers hence suffer an incorrect pronoun the entire time. Singular
> > "they" applies to every reader.
> 
> I'd expect most people to not actively read technical documentation and
> try to personally actively ascribe themselves to prose that clearly
> forms an example of something they may or may not do.
> 
> If that is how people commonly read documentation and find it
> off-putting I'd expect gendered language to be the least of our
> problems, since even with s/\bhe|she\b/they/g so much of what's left is
> still referring to hypothetical situations most users won't want to find
> themselves in.
> 
> Maybe I'm overthinking this, but per the above I'd think if this is a
> problem with losing the reader that we'd need more structural solutions
> to it in the common case, e.g. more guarded language that you should not
> read further if you don't care about XYZ aspect of the technical feature
> we're about to discuss.

Personally I have no trouble at all reading instructions mentioning a
female user and see how they apply to me just the same.

Using a singular "they" for semantically singular antecedents does sound
totally broken to me, and that does distract me from what the
documentation is supposedly trying to transmit.

I have trouble parsing the documentation as it is--which does feel to be
in a very detached and unpersonal style. Changes like s/s?he/they/ only
make the situation worse. I would rather have the documentation speak to
me more like a person, and less like a previous-generation AI.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras