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

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

On Mon, Jun 07 2021, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

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