Freaky Smart People

So, I'm writing this from Murfreesboro, TN where I am sitting in my room at the Double Tree full of knowledge and free wine. All this is because I am at the Conference on John Milton where I got to present a paper on Wycliffe's possible influence on the prose writing of John Milton.

What's really cool about conferences like these are that you are sitting around with all the people you reference in your own papers. I got to speak to Michael Lieb about my paper, who told me that I was "on solid theoretical ground," which made me feel good for a second. I met John Shawcross, a seventeenth-century scholar whose work I very much admire. Then when I ran into him in the hallway this morning, he said, "Good morning Jeff," and I thought, holy-cow, John Shawcross knows my name. He's a tiny old man who is still completely brilliant and who walks around during a party because he doesn't want to sit. All these people are extremely generous people who really want to bring young scholars along in the field.

But alas, Sunday night I will be home which, on one hand is really good because I miss my wife, but I am also terrified because I have to go back to my own desk where I have a two foot stack of student papers to grade.

The Writer and Their Only Gender Neutral Option

A contemporary trend in composition textbooks is the view that academic writers should be on guard against the accidentally sexist use of pronouns. By this I am referring to sentences such as, "the writer should pay attention to the pronouns he chooses to use." The use of the pronoun, while not necessarily sexist, is certainly sexually exclusive. This presents a problem in modern English, a language that must now accommodate a more egalitarian concept of readerly/writerly identity. While English is fortunate not to have gender specific adjectives like those of the Latinate languages, English, like so many languages that derived their system of logic from Latin, has no gender neutral pronouns. While I am not concerned with political correctness, actual correctness should be something for which we strive, should it not? And if we are to be factually correct in our use of language, we must address the gendered pronoun issue. Of course, the long accepted solution has been to use the phrase, "he or she" but any reader will tell you, this device becomes very monotonous, very quickly. The style problem caused by this phrase is compounded by the fact that there is also no gender neutral possessive. Thus he or she must own his or her whatever he or she owns. Clearly an alternate solution is needed. Here are my solutions. They're actually solutions arrived at by writers struggling with the issue who have un-dogmatically invented solutions as needed. I am simply setting them forth in attempt to codify them.

1) Assign gender based on the writer's identity. It seems to me that when a writer is referring to an unspecific subject, the writer is generally and unconsciously being autobiographical. That is to say that when the writer of a composition textbook says, "the writer should never assume that his audience will naturalize his assumptions," the ambiguous "he" to which the writer refers is the writer himself. This is true because what the writer is giving you as a lesson in how to write is a rule that has worked for him. He is therefore thinking of himself as the writer and bidding the reader to do what he does. Therefore, I propose that the writer use his or her own sex, as I have done here.

2) Accept "They" and "their" as gender neutral pronouns. "They" and its possessive "their" are English's only gender neutral pronouns. The problem is, of course, that they are plural. It is therefore technically incorrect to say, "the writer [singular] must sharpen their [plural] pencil." The use of they and their as singular pronoun is already in common practice, yet if any student uses the word in this way, he or she is likely to have it graded as "wrong." There is, on one hand, a fallacy in grading here. Since language is based on common use, the fact that using "their" as a gender neutral pronoun has been in common use for some time makes it correct, whether English departments want to accept it or not. Plus, with the absense of better gender neutral words, these are our language's only single word alternatives. I have already committed to myself not to judge these pronouns as incorrect in my own students' papers, though I will need to remind them that others will.

My personal preference is for the first choice. I like it better for stylistic reasons; "they" and "their" still sound incorrect. I also like the ethos that is added by the linguistic reminder that the writer is present. If the reader knew that the writer would be sexing his argument based on his own identity, every time the reader came across a gendered word, it would remind the reader that the writer is indeed real. In this way, the writer is constantly reasserting his humanity; the speaker is a person, not a system of scribbles on a page.