Application essays and the singular "they"

[brasssun]

Here I am writing various application essays. They're getting real irritating and repetitive and I'm fighting back temptation to throw in random tangents just to make the essays more interesting, even though I know perfectly well that the readers are all different and it's not only okay but a good idea to simply tailor the same essay to each

Comments

[sildra]

While I completely approve of the singular "they" and wish it would be more widely accepted (as it is in speech), I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to use it at all in formal writing at this point. I would tend to shy away from using it in an application essay. So then the issue just doesn't come up for me at all, except in speech where people don't care much.

[brasssun]

It's actually been a considered choice on my part: I want to promote the use of the singular "they" and hope that by including it in an otherwise formal writing setting that I will convince people of it's virtue.

On the other hand, the many many essays may be driving me loopy. Sigh.

[sildra]

That seems like the sort of thing you can get away with once you're a professor or something, but not when you're applying to stuff. If I were reading application essays and saw that, I wouldn't assume it was a pointed decision but, rather, sloppiness.

[brasssun]

Sigh. I think you're probably right. I'll edit it out of my remaining essays. Hmph.

[q10]

singular they has different features for coreference relationships (where it's singular) and for verb agreement (where it's formally plural). i can't offhand think of any other case of this in English, but that may just be because there are only a few places where English grammar is sensitive to these kinds of features.

η: also, what sildra said.

[tirerim]

One clue to the future of they might be the past of you, which used to be only plural, and we had a separate paradigm for second person singular (thou art, thou hast, etc.) before it was entirely supplanted by the plural form. I'm too lazy to go figure out exactly what you did while it was in transition, but my impression is that the second person singular pronouns and verbs continued in existence as formal forms for some time, and you was never used with the singular verb forms.

[q10]

i'm pretty sure that during the transition, you was formal and thou was informal.

the difference with the they case is that when thou was probably the only (or at least the only commonly used) phrase in the language that triggered 2sg verb agreement, so when it disappeared the 2pl verb forms took over for the old 2sg ones, following the agreement patter of you. there's no one 3sg form that they could replace to get rid of the -s verb forms. even in the unlikely event of it displacing all the other formally 3sg pronouns (he, she, it, arguably one), there will still be lots of other third person phrases that will trigger 3sg agreement. so it'll be harder for they to simply wipe out the existing 3sg verb forms - my gut sense is that the tension discussed above (where some semantically 3sg subjects get -s/is/was agreement and others get -0/are/were agreement) will be with us for a while.

[brasssun]

As far as I know, there's no official formal/informal distinction in English anymore, but it would certainly be interesting if it were to come back due to this transition. Unofficially, I suppose it sort of has given that I was just advised to only use the singular "they" in informal settings, but not in formal ones.

I'm not sure what the timing was like, but there was certainly a point where "thee" and "thou" were the two second-person singular pronouns. "Thee" was informal, "thou" was formal. "Thou" eventually replaced "thee" entirely. So was this significantly before "you" starting being singular and thus not involved at all, or did the transitions blur into each other?