Thread (9 messages) 9 messages, 6 authors, 2021-06-18

Re: [PATCH v3 4/4] CodingGuidelines: recommend singular they

From: Felipe Contreras <hidden>
Date: 2021-06-17 15:12:24

Possibly related (same subject, not in this thread)

Junio C Hamano wrote:

-  - Removing the example person might make the sentence more
-    clear and efficient.  Instead of saying "The programmer
-    chooses between X and Y as she sees fit", it is clearer to
-    say "Valid choices are X and Y".
-
-  - If you need to talk about an example person, then try using
-    second-person to allow the reader to be that example.  For
-    example, "If you want X to happen, you'd pass option Y",
-    instead of "If the user wants X to happen, she'd ...").
-    Alternatively, replace the single example with more than one
-    person and use plural "they", such as "Interested readers
-    can read 'git log -p README' to learn the history in their
-    ample spare time" instead of "an interested reader" learning
-    in "his" spare time).
-
-  - If you absolutely need to refer to an example person that is
-    third-person singluar, you may resort to "singular they" (e.g.
-    "A contributor asks their upstream to pull from them").
Here is another escape hatch recommended by linguists before attempting
to use singular "they":

 - Use a generic alternative and count on the reader's common sense.
   Instead of saying "she made a mistake", say "a mistake was made".

-    Note
-    that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to those who
-    learned English as a second language in some parts of the
-    world, so should be avoided unless the earlier techniques
-    fail to improve the sentence.
For the nth time, it's not just foreign speakers:

https://ahdictionary.tumblr.com/post/147597257733/updated-usage-note-they
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
+  - Prefer succinctness and matter-of-factly describing functionality
+    in the abstract.  E.g.
+
+     --short:: Emit output in the short-format.
+
+    and avoid something like these overly verbose alternatives:
+
+     --short:: Use this to emit output in the short-format.
+     --short:: You can use this to get output in the short-format.
+     --short:: A user who prefers shorter output could....
+     --short:: Should a person and/or program want shorter output, he
+               she/they/it can...
+
+    This practice often eliminates the need to involve human actors in
+    your description, but it is a good practice regardless of the
+    avoidance of gendered pronouns.
+
+  - When it becomes awkward to stick to this style, prefer "you" when
+    addressing the the hypothetical user, and possibly "we" when
+    discussing how the program might react to the user.  E.g.
+
+      You can use this option instead of --xyz, but we might remove
+      support for it in future versions.
+
+    while keeping in mind that you can probably be less verbose, e.g.
+
+      Use this instead of --xyz. This option might be removed in future
+      versions.
+
+  - If you still need to refer to an example person that is
+    third-person singular, you may resort to "singular they" to avoid
+    "he/she/him/her", e.g.
+
+      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.
These look OK to me, but I wonder why we have writing tips in *coding*
guidelines.

We are not writing a style manual, there's plenty of other tips writers
of documentation, commit messages and comments could use, why are we
only giving tips for gender pronouns?

Why don't we have a section on passive vs. active voice? How about
avoiding zombie nouns? Adjectives and adverbs? That vs. which? Who and
whom?

I don't think there's much value in trying to codify what is a good
sense of style while writing just for one particular non-issue.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help