: Re: What's the modern way to handle gender in tech writing? Back in my day, I was taught to use masculine pronouns. The user chooses a password, and then he types it in the text box.

@Martha805

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I can't say this has ever been a significant issue for me in twenty years of technical writing. You are rarely if ever writing about the user, but are generally writing to them, and thus the operative pronoun (often implied) is generally "you."

In some situations, you might end up writing to one user about another user—for example, when your audience consists of system administrators or developers, who will be concerned about users of their systems or applications. But even here, the need to use third-person singular pronouns comes up less frequently than you might think. For example:

User: Class representing a user account on the system.

FIELDS
name The user's full name
mail The user's mail address
password The user's password
groups List of groups to which the user belongs
permissions List of permissions available to the user
expiry Date on which the user's account expired or will expire
admins List of users who may edit or delete the account

METHODS
register() Registers a new user account in the system directory
update() Writes a modified user account in the system directory
delete() Permanently deletes a user account from the system directory

The only pronoun used in that snippet of API documentation, which is about a user class, is "who." It is not at all necessary to write it like this:

User: Class representing a user account on the system.

FIELDS
name His or her full name
mail His or her mail address

... etc.

In fact, saying "the user" each time is arguably better because it allows the reader to skim for the information they're interested in without having to keep track of possible antecedents for pronouns. The phrase "the user" in a computer manual is like "said" in fiction: mostly invisible, and almost always far less intrusive than attempts to avoid it.

In my experience, the gender issue simply comes up infrequently enough that the well-worn workarounds suffice. I typically just use "he or she," or else recast the sentence to be plural and use "they," or rewrite the sentence in some other way that usually is even clearer.

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