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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 15, 2021, 18:02 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq35sftpzn.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <YPBmv7x3zUbuQ2uy@nand.local>

Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> writes:

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

Thanks.  Last-minute edit always screwes me up.

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>> > +    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.

Yes, the language is living and drifting---and that is why it matters when and where you learned ;-)