[Andrew Suffield] > I'm not convinced that this is a useful data point. Sounds like a > sample with a built-in bias. Anybody who writes a "style guide" > obviously has an axe to grind. Errrrr. You act as though the style guides she looked at talked about nothing *except* gender pronouns. Do you really think editorial guidelines for publications do not have anything else to talk about? You should consider the distant possibility that these guidelines would have existed anyway, with or without the third person singular pronoun issue. To conclude they were necessarily composed by someone with an axe to grind about pronoun use is silly. > The opposing data point is to observe that out of all the people who > are qualified to write such documents (hundreds, maybe thousands), > only six have made such comments. Are you implicitly accusing telsa of picking and choosing the style guidelines she wanted to quote? She said she had gone in to research the matter out of curiosity. She said six of these guides, out of the six she could find, all said pretty much the same thing, with variations. I don't see how you can come away with the conclusion that these guides are not likely to be representative. It's not like the hundreds or thousands of people capable of writing style guidelines all happen to work for publishing companies that need such a thing written up. Peter
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