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

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 [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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".

quoted

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