Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > On Mon, Jun 07 2021, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote: > > 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
