58 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality Even the use of ‘he,’ ‘she’ and ‘they’ can be fraught with difficulties, particularly because of the need to avoid gender-specific language. The matter is straightforward when speaking of a male or female subject, but when your language needs to be more general, problems can arise. Some writers would argue that ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘their’ are acceptable, non-gender-specific substitutes for the singular forms ‘he or she,’ ‘him or her’ and ‘his or her.’ However, ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘their’ are plural, so they are not appropriate or correct with reference to singular nouns, and using them as though they are can quickly become extremely confusing. So when you use something like ‘a person,’ you need to use a singular pronoun: ‘when a person considers the idea, he or she also realises…,’ not ‘when a person considers the idea, they also realise.’ Finally, a human being, person, participant, interviewee, mother, man, teenager or girl is never an ‘it,’ so do be sure to use ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘they’ (or ‘him,’ ‘her’ or ‘them’ in the objective cases and ‘his,’ ‘her’ and ‘their’ in the possessive) when referring to a person. Relative pronouns should be used similarly: ‘the man who did that’ or ‘the participant who scored highest,’ not ‘the man that did that’ or ‘the participant that scored highest.’ Such careful usage will not only render your writing clearer and more precise, it will also keep the human element alive in your prose along with scholarly formality. Avoiding the use of a generalising ‘we’ and a ‘you’ that’s too direct does not mean that you should remove the human element from your prose, and there are a variety of ways to retain this element. Sometimes when reporting complex methods and data while working within tight word limits, an author can let words that assert the presence of human participants in a study fall to the wayside. Most common is the tendency for patients or participants suffering from a particular disease or ailment to be reduced through a kind of shorthand to the disease or ailment. While this sort of language is sometimes necessary to convey results efficiently, it should be PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk