Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: recommend gender-neutral description

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Jul 15, 2021, 16:47 UTC
Message-ID: <YPBmv7x3zUbuQ2uy@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cT24=jy65C1cQ4WarakJHKm4F8_78nDm=jWOnHxfhtcRw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 12:35:30PM -0400, Eric Sunshine wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 12:25 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > Technical writing seeks to convey information with minimal
> > friction. One way that a reader can experience friction is if they
> > encounter a description of "a user" that is later simplified using a
> > gendered pronoun. If the reader does not consider that pronoun to
> > apply to them, then they can experience cognitive dissonance that
> > removes focus from the information.
> >
> > Give some basic tips to guide us avoid unnecessary of gendered
> > description.
>
> Some words seem to be missing from this sentence.

I assume that it's supposed to read "guide us [to] avoid unnecessary [uses] of gendered description".

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>
> > diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
> > @@ -541,6 +541,49 @@ Writing Documentation:
> > +      A contributor asks their upstream to pull from them.
> > +
> > +    Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to those who
> > +    learned English as a second language in some parts of the world.
>
> It also sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to this native English speaker.

Apologies if this suggestion has been made earlier in the thread, but this article

    https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/grammar/singular-they

document from the APA's style guide helps convince me that this is grammatical.

Thanks, Taylor