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

Taylor Blau [off-list ref] writes:

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

quoted

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".

Thanks.  Last-minute edit always screwes me up.

quoted

quoted

+    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 ;-)