: Re: How I should handle gender-neutral pronoun in technical writing? I am writing API documentation for a mobile loyalty program and I am not sure which of the following is better wording: 1) When

@Ravi5107385

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Your second and third options ("his/her" and "their") are both fine.

The choice between them is a matter of taste. Strictly speaking, the use of "singular they" is ungrammatical, being a plural pronoun used to describe a single person, but it has a long history as a colloquialism and is becoming widely used as a way to avoid making assumptions about the gender of the person being described. "His/her" is more grammatically acceptable but clumsy and doesn't transfer well to speech. You could also use "his or her", which is unquestionably correct in grammar but takes a long time to write or say.

Don't use the first option ("its"), as the use of "it" implies that the user of your loyalty program is not human. Perhaps in the future we will need to find ways to allow for the possibility of users who are robots or genderless beings from other planets, but that time is not yet.

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