Have you ever wondered which of these is correct?
A. Each student must bring his or her own laptop to the seminar.
B. Each student must bring their own laptop to the seminar.
Technically, A is correct and B is incorrect. This is because "each student" is singular--it refers to each individual student--while "their" is a plural pronoun. A noun must match its pronoun.
However, although "their" is technically grammatically incorrect in that sentence, not every editor would flag it. Here's why: In the days before politically correct speech became the norm, everyone just used "he/his/him" as "gender neutral" pronouns. When we started paying more attention to using unbiased language, we realized that "he" isn't actually neutral at all--it's masculine. This poses a problem, though. Do we use "he or she" instead? Some people say yes, but others argue that plugging in "he or she" every time is cumbersome.
So--many people use "they/their" to deal with this issue. The reason this is technically ungrammatical is that "they" is a plural pronoun. In a sentence like the example above, where you've established a singular subject ("an individual"), you technically need a singular pronoun.
Let's look at another example:
*According to the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988; Rosenstock, 2004), an individual's behavior is the result of their health beliefs or the subjective value that he or she places on a given outcome (e.g., the desire to avoid illness or to get well) and their belief or expectation that a particular action will lead to that outcome.
As you can see, this sentence employs a mix of singular and plural
pronouns--the author uses both "he or she" and "their." You could fix
this sentence in a number of ways (I have highlighted my changes):
His/her and he/she:
*According to the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988; Rosenstock, 2004), an individual’s behavior is the result of his or her health beliefs or the subjective value that he or she places on a given outcome (e.g., the desire to avoid illness or to get well) and the belief or expectation that a particular action will lead to that outcome.
Notice that I changed "their" to "the" in the latter part of the
sentence to avoid using "his or her" again. You could also do this (to
further avoid the "his or her...he or she" repetition):
S/he:
*According to the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988; Rosenstock, 2004), an individual’s behavior is the result of his or her health beliefs or the subjective value that s/he places on a given outcome (e.g., the desire to avoid illness or to get well) and the belief or expectation that a particular action will lead to that outcome.
In this example, I changed "he or she" to "s/he." Some writers like
this solution, while others claim that it looks too informal.
Some experts (myself included) recommend wording sentences to avoid the whole problem, like this:
*According to the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988; Rosenstock, 2004), an individual’s behavior is the result of the health beliefs or the subjective value that individual places on a given outcome (e.g., the desire to avoid illness or to get well), and the belief or expectation that a particular action will lead to that outcome.
Or like this (change the singular noun to a plural noun):
*According to the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988; Rosenstock, 2004), individuals behave according to their health beliefs or the subjective value they place on a given outcome (e.g., the desire to avoid illness or to get well), and the belief or expectation that a particular action will lead to that outcome.
that example, I changed "an individual" (singular) to "individuals" (plural). This made it appropriate to use the plural pronouns "they" and "their," thus eliminating the problem. This won't always be a good option; it depends on the sentence.
Earlier I said that not every editor would have flagged this. This is because it's been a lot of years since the advent of politically correct speech, and people are getting tired of having to wrestle with their pronouns. Using "they/their" instead of "he or she" is an easy solution that doesn't usually cause reader confusion (most of the time, readers will realize that you are simply trying to avoid cumbersome wording). Many experts believe that eventually using "they/their" as gender neutral pronouns will become the new rule, but at the moment it's still technically grammatically incorrect. For some people, in fact, it's a pet peeve. Until the rule changes, then, the best thing to do is word the sentence to avoid the whole sticky mess.
For more on this, check out this great post by "Grammar Girl" Mignon Fogerty: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/generic-singular-pronouns?page=all
I hope you've found this week's post helpful. Happy scribbling!
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