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Petusek Posted 14 years ago
Grammar

Singular, Gender, Agreement

Hello,

In order to use gender-neutral language, I've translated a sentence in my native language to English in the following way:

"...
The user thus gets their hands on a unique tool to evaluate the feasibility of the sale and the future profitability of the company.
..."

Is that correct grammatically?

Many thanks in advance!

Best,

P.
  

Top answer

This is a constant problem in English, as we have not gender-neutral pronoun. What you have offered is very common, especially in casual situations, but becaue of the problem of agreement, in formal writing I would use the plural users .

— Philip

  • This is a constant problem in English, as we have not gender-neutral pronoun.
  • What you have offered is very common, especially in casual situations, but becaue of the problem of agreement, in formal writing I would use the plural users .
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2 Answers
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This is a constant problem in English, as we have not gender-neutral pronoun. What you have offered is very common, especially in casual situations, but becaue of the problem of agreement, in formal writing I would use the plural users.
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I see. Thank you, Philip.

How about changing it to the second person, i.e. "You thus gets your hands on a unique tool to evaluate the feasibility of the sale and the future profitability of the company."

Would that be acceptable in a text like that? To give you a little more context: it's a snippet from lengthy description of some software, whose main purpose
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