Last week I completed the initial edit of a book we'll be publishing later this year. It took me longer than I expected, not because the writing was poor—on the contrary it was quite good—but because I spent a great deal of time rewriting sentences where they and their were used with a singular antecedent. Here is a typical example: “The reader will become frustrated if they can't find their answer on the first page of search results.”
By my informal and unscientific count, most English language pundits on the Web—and there are many who have taken up this topic—consider the “singular they” to be acceptable English. They cite Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and any number of other well-respected writers, along with increasingly common usage. To these pundits, the singular they is preferable to he, he or she, and similar sexist or awkward constructions.
So I will, reluctantly, concede that the “singular they” is acceptable, if not strictly correct, English. However, I do not use that construction in my writing or editing.
In situations like this, I follow the robustness principle, which states: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”
The second part of the robustness principle explains why your browser doesn't crash every time it encounters a poorly coded HTML page. Browsers are designed to be resilient when faced with poorly written HTML. They may not do exactly what you expect, but they do their best to render whatever gets thrown at them without crashing.
While the second part of the robustness principle is critical to the workings of the Web, not to mention human relations, it's the first part I'm concerned with here: “Be conservative in what you do.” While I will overlook grammar or punctuation problems in text I read, I will not knowingly inflict them on readers. The reason is simple; I want readers focused on the content, not the writing. I don't want a reader to stumble, for even a moment, over a point of grammar or punctuation.
Therefore, I rewrite to avoid the singular they. It's rarely hard to rewrite, and the result works equally well for those who accept the singular they and those who hate it. But my application of the robustness principle goes further.
In some cases, incorrect usage has overtaken correct usage. A classic example is the word comprise. The sentence “New York City is comprised of five boroughs.” is incorrect. Comprise means “to contain,” so the sentence should be “New York City comprises five boroughs.”
But the incorrect usage is so common that I'm pretty sure most people consider “is comprised of” to be correct and, even more important, will hit a pothole—a brief distraction—when they encounter the correct usage. No matter which form you choose, comprise creates a pothole for a significant subset of your readers. Therefore, I avoid it altogether.
You can carry the robustness principle into other aspects of writing and business. For example, a musician's website that starts playing audio when someone lands on the page might be appealing to that musician's fans, but it will reliably turn off others. The same thing happens with Flash, though a lot of restaurant owners haven't learned that lesson yet. In both cases, something that might be attractive to some visitors will repel others.
This doesn't mean you need to become boring and stick to the middle of the road. Your content needs to be compelling and useful. But the path to that content needs to be as free from potholes as you can make it. It will never be completely free—English grammar and punctuation can be ambiguous and arbitrary, and no two readers will consistently agree on what is correct—but you can make the path smoother.
Richard L. Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, content strategists, marketers, and the engineers who support their work. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the 2nd edition of Norm Walsh's DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published in collaboration with O'Reilly Media.