Monday, February 28, 2011
Liberating Grammar!
A student wrote: “You don’t have to punish a kid without showing him/her his/her mistake.” It was quite admirable, I have to say, that a student at Agahozo-Shalom successfully went through the grammatical circus hoops necessary to include women in her sentences. However, I remember, a few years back, to my great joy, some official body in the US – that decides grammar rules – told us that we could now use the singular possessive adjective and pronoun (is that what it is?) for people, useful for when you don’t want to be sexist or awkward-sounding: This student can technically now write: “You don’t have to punish a kid without showing them their mistake.” She could have done this with her other sentences as well. She continued her writing with, “First of all talk to him/her, discuss, and negotiate. Then, when the kid will understand his/her mistake, you agree about what to do, but punishment is not the first solution.” I didn’t correct this student, partly because it is still technically alright to do it the old-fashioned way, but also because I am not sure that this particular change has caught on in Rwanda and Uganda, where their teachers were trained, or in the Rwandan Ministry of Education, which will decide what grade they will get in national matriculation exams. But these sentences the student wrote were more annoying to read than her sentences with actual grammar mistakes – I had to do a double take not to correct them, realized they were ok, then remembered that the girl has other options – lots of “they”s and “them”s that can now be utilized in the United States and, hopefully, can be utilized in the rest of the world.
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I doubt if there is an official body in the US that sets rules of grammar. The rules of grammar are whatever a given speech community uses. But it is certainly true that in the past 5 or 10 years (maybe earlier, but I didn't become aware of it until then), the use of plural pronouns ("them" and "their") with singular antecedents, has become acceptable even in formal writing in the United States and probably other Western countries as well, when you do not want to specify the gender of the antecedent, do not want to follow the old practice of using masculine pronouns in such cases, and do not want to use awkward constructions such as "him/her", "he/she", etc.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, for someone who is learning English, I think it might not be a bad thing to use "he/she", "him/her", etc. This will, it seems to me, reinforce in the student's mind the general rule in English (which the new practice is an exception to) that pronouns have to agree with their antecedents in number, as well as in gender. Although a native speaker already knows that rule and does not need to reinforce it, it might be helpful for a non-native learner of English to reinforce that rule.
Another approach to avoiding the use of "he/she", "his/her", etc., is to say things in such a way that you never have to use such pronouns. This can almost always be done without sounding awkward if you work at it, but requires some thought, and might be challenging for a student to do. On the other hand, it might be a useful exercise for a student to try doing it, especially if using plural pronouns for this purpose hasn't caught on yet in Rwanda. I first learned about this approach to using non-sexist language from Douglas Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American in the 1980s, before the use of plural pronouns with singular antecedents was acceptable in formal writing in the United States. I actually prefer that approach, over using plural pronouns with singular antecedents--I still find that grating--but maybe it is too hard for most people to do, especially if they are speaking spontaneously. It usually requires some advance planning, and is more suitable for writing than for speaking.