The thing that really grinds my gears is the excessive use of “he/she”. Workplace training is a regular offender for this. Just use the word “they” FFS, it’s sat right there on the shelf for you.
Or don’t, just go with “he” or “she”, this fictional person in your ‘case study’ isn’t real, they don’t give a shit.
Some academic fields a decade or two ago went through a phase where they intentionally used “she” for all pronouns. The idea was because academia was so male dominated, even a neutral pronoun would still make people inagine a male lab worker, statistician, etc when reading. Intentionally using “she” was thought to force people to imagine a woman and normalise that image.
Reminds me of Ancillary Justice / The Imperial Radch series. Every once in a while you get hints like “she could tell this person had a specific gender in this culture based on how she wore her facial hair, but she could never remember” because the main character (and most of the story) is in the context of a society where gender doesn’t exist and everyone is referred to with English feminine pronouns.
The thing that really grinds my gears is the excessive use of “he/she”. Workplace training is a regular offender for this. Just use the word “they” FFS, it’s sat right there on the shelf for you.
Or don’t, just go with “he” or “she”, this fictional person in your ‘case study’ isn’t real, they don’t give a shit.
Some academic fields a decade or two ago went through a phase where they intentionally used “she” for all pronouns. The idea was because academia was so male dominated, even a neutral pronoun would still make people inagine a male lab worker, statistician, etc when reading. Intentionally using “she” was thought to force people to imagine a woman and normalise that image.
Reminds me of Ancillary Justice / The Imperial Radch series. Every once in a while you get hints like “she could tell this person had a specific gender in this culture based on how she wore her facial hair, but she could never remember” because the main character (and most of the story) is in the context of a society where gender doesn’t exist and everyone is referred to with English feminine pronouns.
James Acaster bit about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt5qJC1xQ8A