I agree with Kurt on that. In scientific writing in microeconomics (strategic behavior, er, technically it's called game theory...), we sometimes make a compromise: allocate genders to the (neutral) agents you are talking about. For instance, in a paper about markets, you might decide to talk of every buyers as a "he" and every seller as a "she". It actually adds clarity to writing when you get used to it (easier identification), but it might be too field-specific to help you. 

Carlos Alos-Ferrer
Professor of Economics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de





Am 04-Sep-2014 21:40:43 +0200 schrieb kurt@thepaw.org:

On 9/4/2014 3:14 PM, Mike Looney wrote:
> I posted this to one of the face book Traveller groups, so you may
> have seen it. I'm looking for as much input on this as possible.
>
>
> Semi random question about pronouns. I'm in the process of doing a
> weapon and vehicle book. For Reasons, I don't want to use the English
> generic "he/him/his".
>
> I have, at this point what I think are two primary options.
> 1) use she/her/hers (which given that lead example character is a
> female human makes some sense) or
> use Spivak LambdaMOO pronouns. This does have the force of history
> behind it, given it was made for gaming with. Any thoughts?
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun

Stay with the traditional methods and don't get cutsey and try to be
politically correct/neutral. Nothing aggravates me more than to be
reading a manual (game book, technical manual, or something else) where
they jump back and forth between masculine and feminine or try to go a
different route and be cute and go some PC route. In those cases my
tolerance drops to almost nil and unless the material is outstanding in
every other way, I tend to get very critical and often lose interest.


--
Kurt Feltenberger
kurt@thepaw.org/kfeltenberger@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not
living enough." - Me


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