​This past week, the AP style guide announced changes for the next edition. One big change getting a lot of attention is its official approval of using “they” to refer to singular rather than plural people. As great as the move is for including people with non-binary gender identities, their endorsement of “they” is limited.
 
I want more.
 
Here’s what the AP blog describes as one of the key passages in the new guide:

In other words, do everything you can to avoid using “they” to refer to just one person. I can imagine how journalists will  “explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun.” Something like, “Alex argues that their (note that “their” here refers to just the one person, Alex, who prefers a gender-neutral pronoun) gender should not a factor.”
 
Elegant. And so much better than just writing, “Alex argues that their gender should not be a factor.” (Does sarcasm come across in writing? Not very well.)
 
The AP defends its position by saying we’re not used to singular “they,” that “gender-neutral use of a singular they is unfamiliar to many readers.”
 
Except that’s not true. We may not be used to singular “they” to refer to a specific individual like Riley, but we’re all used to using “they” for the singular without marking gender. And we may even be used to some uses of “they” to refer to a specific individual with a specific gender.
 
In fact, it has a long history:
 
From the 1526 Tyndale English version of the Bible (from Wayne Leman, Better Bibles blog)

Matt. 18:35:
        So lyke wyse shall my hevenly father do vnto you except ye forgeve with youre hertes eache one to his
       brother their treaspases. (Tyndale, 1526)
Notice that we’re forgiving a male “brother” their trespasses.
 
From Jane Austen’s Emma (from pemberley.com)

Emma Woodhouse to Mr. Knightley [discussing Harriet Smith]:
       "Who is in love with her? Who makes you their confidant?"
Since we know Emma assumes Harriet’s potential lover is male, “their” here too is used instead of the gender-specific “his.”
 
These passages are usually quoted to show the long history of using “they” to refer to singular nouns where the gender is not specific.  Contemporary examples are everywhere:
 
       If anyone has a question, they should step to the microphone.
       Whoever spilled red wine on my white rug should clean up their mess.
 
Although it’s a favorite shibboleth of some grammar snobs, such use of “they” is so common in speech most people wouldn’t notice it. And I suspect it’s now more commonly used and less often noticed in writing as well as speech.
 
In the past few years, that singular use of “they” has received a flurry of endorsements—by the Washington Post in 2015 and the American Dialect Society in 2016, to name two biggies.
 
Several great language blogs have written about this use of “they” (you’ll find multiple entries on this use of “they” on language log)
 
And Geoff Nunberg has a nice summary of the issues and its history on npr.org, “Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not”

But until relatively recently, that use of “they” has been banned by style guides and handbooks. And it is still shunned in the new version of the AP style guide. Quoting from the key passages in their blog again,

That’s why I want more from them.
 
We now have two reasons we need the singular “they”:

• “They” can serve as a pronoun for nouns that appear singular in form, like “no one” and “whoever” and “every reader,” where the gender is unknown or both/neither
•  “They” can refer to people of all variations who prefer not to be identified by a binary, gender-specific pronoun

 
And I might add a third reason--

• No writer would have to distort their sentences to write around the fact that they don’t know or don’t care about the gender. Every writer could find their own path. See? No harm done. Not even that noticeable.

 
I’d like to suggest we go even further and make it noticeable.

What if we just start using “they” as the singular pronoun in all cases—known gender or not, individual person or not, gender-specific preference or not?
 
        I like how Jane Austen created their characters with strengths and flaws.

       Tell Emma that they should stop meddling.

       Tell your brother to put away their toys, now! 

​I know, I know, it sounds weird. Our ears aren’t used to it. And I’m enough of a linguist to know that this is not how language changes. We could all start campaigning against “he/him/his/himself” and “she/her/hers/herself” and those gender-specific words would remain dominant. And besides, those words work when we know the gender is male or female. And besides again, having just one form for both singular and plural would create some ambiguity, like there currently is for the singular and plural “you.” Why do you think we have the words “y’all” and “you guys” and “you’uns” and “you folks”?
 
But there’s a reason to try, a reason to start raising awareness about those gender-specific usages--
equity and social justice.

• Singular “they” doesn’t mark anyone off as “other,” as the one who’s not the “normal” “she” or “he” but “they”

 
So there’s a fourth reason we need singular “they.” So that we’re all “they.” No one stands out as the “they” in a room of “he"s and “she"s. If they want to stand out, they’ll have to do it in ways other than the pronouns we use to refer to them.
 
Let’s all be them.
 
According to Merriam-Webster dictionaries, they “have evidence in our files of the nonbinary they dating back to 1950, and it’s likely that there are earlier uses of the nonbinary pronoun they out there.” So isn't it about time we use the language we need?

Yep, it’s optimist Amy again, wanting us to try even if it’s pie in the sky, wanting us to strive to do the right thing, even if it wouldn’t work. If the AP style guide wants writers to insert an explanation whenever one of us prefers to be referred to as “they,” let’s go with it:
​
       Amy wrote an idealistic blog post, but they prefer idealism to inequity (the use of “they” here permits
       all people to be treated equitably, if only in this small way)
​

​It’s March Madness time
 
in the USA
 
for basketball fans
 
college basketball fans
 
men’s college basketball fans
 
whose brackets haven’t been so thoroughly busted that they’ve given up watching the tournament
 
It’s March Madness time for some folks. (If you’re not one of those folks, I hope you enjoy this rhetorical analysis and genre play anyway.)
 
And that means it’s time for basketball fans and friends of fans to fill out their tournament brackets. Or, since I’m posting this just before the last weekend of the Final Four games, it’s time for almost all of us fans to mourn our busted brackets and scowl at the non-fan friends whose brackets are still intact after selecting their winners according to the cutest uniforms or funniest mascots.
 
Yep, expertise doesn’t win in this tournament. As Josh Jackson, a player for my school, the University of Kansas (KU), said

​and then that team loses, in spite of the stats and the odds and all the expert analysis.
 
You might have guessed—Saturday KU had its one crappy game. It lost its game to Oregon in the Elite Eight, a game KU should have won, according to the stats and the experts.
 
So much for brackets and expertise.
 
Out of my mourning for my busted bracket—and even more from my regret that the KU Seniors Landon Lucas, Frank Mason, and Tyler Self end their college careers in such a sad way—I thought I’d comment on the whole madness of tournament brackets. I'm leaving out the many, many, many other genres that surround the bracket--the selection shows on TV, stats, RPIs, online discussion groups, betting odds, and even busted bracket brackets. Not to mention the games themselves, the play-by-plays, color commentary, interviews, halftime shows, pregame shows, chants, cheers, and booing.

But sticking to the bracket . . .
 
Tournament brackets—a genre created by expertise and some marketing and a genre busted by talent and some luck.
 
Here’s a little rhetorical analysis from someone who’s relatively expert in rhetoric but not at all expert in tournament brackets.
 
What’s the purpose of the tournament bracket? Who’s its audience? What else from the context shapes or constrains it? And what does that tell us about this genre and about this game?
 
For the NCAA and its expert selection committee, the bracket

• selects the 36 best teams not automatically qualified through winning their conference or tournament
• seeds the 68 teams that will play in the tournament (ranking them)
• places the teams into a bracket that matches who will play whom

 
The bracket creates the games that teams will play, if they keep winning, and the games that we fans will watch, if the NCAA has done a good job of matching up teams we want to watch play.
 
Because there are other purposes to the bracket—like creating match-ups fans want to watch in order to increase TV ratings and NCAA revenues. Oh of course those aren’t stated purposes and I’m sure the tournament Selection Committee is fair and honest. But the procedures for creating the bracket specify things like not having teams play each other too soon if they’re in the same conference. Could that be partly to make more exciting match-ups with potential audiences from more parts of the country and wider markets? The procedures specify avoiding rematches of various kinds. Could that be partly because it’s generally more exciting to watch teams play that haven’t played each other before? That’s the great opportunity of the tournament, having great teams play each other who wouldn’t ordinarily meet. The primary purpose of the bracket may not be to market games to audiences, but some of those bracketing procedures sure don’t hurt TV ratings or NCAA revenues.
 
The primary audience already shows up in the purpose—the teams who will play, including players and coaches and their staffs, but also the fans. Then come all the secondary users of the bracket—ticket sellers, TV programmers, alumni associations and others who arrange watch parties or have their work lives affected by the tournament.
 
What’s the purpose of the tournament bracket for fans? It’s different enough that it might even be a different genre from the bracket created by the NCAA.
 
For basketball fans, the bracket takes on another purpose once it’s published: it gives the fans and their friends a fun game to play, guessing which team will win each game. (It also gives bookies a way to make money and offices a way to bond and avoid work, but that’s another topic.) When someone asks, “Do you have your bracket yet?” they aren’t wondering if you’ve seen the NCAA match-ups or pulled a copy of it out of the newspaper. They’re asking if you’ve created your own version of it, with your picks for each game. A different genre with a different purpose, audience, and context.
 
And it's all for fun. Or as James Corden says after spending the day picking his own bracket and then discovering he's not allowed to win money for it, "People do this for fun? Fill out a bracket? Insane."

​After a wonderful conference, I’m now sitting in a house on the Oregon coast looking out at an incredible expanse of ocean, waves, beach, and clouds. It’s quiet, and I’m quiet, and I’m thinking about the contrast between the two experiences and their genres/language/silence.

Much of the language I used at the conference came not from the formal genres that I wrote about last week as making the community. It came instead from the informal genres, the conversations before and after a presentation--chatting with a stranger sitting near me, greeting a slightly known colleague as we pass on the way to the next session, catching up warmly with a former student spotted outside a meeting room. And the longer conversations—a working breakfast with a co-author, lunch with old friends, drinks or dinner with colleagues and friends that range widely from sharing ideas heard in that day’s presentations to catching up with news of families to deeper reflections about careers and lives.

Those create community, too. Communities of colleagues in the field, networks of current and former students and alums of a program (shout-out to the incredible 33 KU folks who made our KU gathering so special), and families of friends who have known each other for twenty years or more. 

And now I’m in a house with one other person, coming no closer to other people than the ones we can see walking on the beach. The separation from community is as intense as was the involvement in community. From 18 hours a day of presentations, discussions, and conversations to 15 hours a day of minimal talk and maximum watching or walking along  the ocean (and, you may have noticed, many more hours of sleep). 

 There was some transition time. Driving to the coast, we listened to KU’s men’s basketball game in the NCAA tourney until we reached our town, where we stopped to watch the second half on TV with friendly locals in the perfect roadside tavern (thanks to the folks at Relief Pitcher). I chatted with the clerks in a grocery store and servers in a restaurant. And I sent a few early vacation photos to a few family members and friends. 

But now we’re tucked in for a while for much needed rest and quiet. And I wonder—where did the genres go? Gone with the language? Oh, there were the formal genres to get us here—rental agreements and maps and such. But here, now, there’s quiet and non-busyness. Is a walk by the ocean a genre? Does reflection in my head count? Do tidal patterns make a genre if I don’t look them up to put a tidal chart to them?

I disrupt this non-languaged moment with this post—a reflection I found myself wanting to write in the moment instead of the vacation placeholder I had planned. But rather than intellectualize about it more or draw conclusions about language, genre, and community, I leave it as is. An observation. A contrast. A reflection.

Perhaps you’d like to continue this post for me, commenting with your own observations and reflections. (I'll add a photo later this week when I can work on my laptop. )

Until next week, may you enjoy both community and quiet in the proportions you most need.

I have colleagues I’ve never met. Friends I don’t know. Family I couldn’t pick out of a lineup. (Well, maybe I could. Both sides of my family have some pretty distinctive physical features.)
 
Colleagues, friends, families. All groups I’m a member of. All communities I’m a part of. I’m confident that you, too, share communities with people you’ve never met.
 
But how can we share a community if I haven’t met the colleagues, don’t know the friends, and wouldn’t recognize the family members?
 
One of the ways is discourse, genres, the shared ways we communicate.
 
I have family members I know only through the family stories told about them, and others I know are part of my family because of my cousin’s record of our family history on Ancestry. I know some family members only through a family Facebook page. But they’re all family.

I have friends I know only through social media. I know, I know, they aren’t truly “friends” in a BFF good friends for life way. Don’t count on Facebook friends to help load your moving truck or show up for your funeral. But there are people I know only through shared Facebook postings who I know friend-type stuff about, like their fondness for decorating cookies or bird-watching or skiing. And I feel friend-type feelings for them when they share successes or struggles. I don’t want to get into a debate about the declining nature of friendship (a cartoon: youngster says “I have hundreds of Facebook friends,” old man replies, “When I was young we called them imaginary friends.”).  But I have a sense of community with friends on Facebook that comes only from our shared genre, Facebook posts.

Let’s start with the official conference genres (it’s a long list, so feel free to skip to the end of the bullets once you get the idea):

• Call for Proposals that defined the conference theme
• Proposals that we submitted to present our work at the conference
• Conference Program that lists the many hundreds of presentations and also contains other genres: a Greeting from the Chair, Welcome from the local arrangements committee, Meeting room maps, Exhibitor list, Advertisements, and Indexes
• Registration form
• Name badges, with first names in large print
• Presentations, whether Prezi talk or paper read
• Roundtables, a differently defined form of sharing work
• Discussions after the presentations or roundtables
• Questions from the audience
• Answers/Responses from the speakers
• Responses from officially designated respondents to a panel (that’s my role this year)
• Posters, for those sharing their work on a poster
• Workshops before and after the conference days
• Opening General Session, which includes the genres of Greetings, Introductions of scholarship recipients, and Award presentations
• Chair’s Address, during the General Session but a defining moment for the conference each year
• Committee meetings, including Special Interest Group meetings
• Book exhibits, that include Books (surprise!), Journals, Flyers, Banners, and increasingly software demonstrations
• Receptions, Breakfasts
• Annual business meeting, including Resolutions, Motions, Amendments, Discussion, Votes, Ballots, all governed by a Guide to Parliamentary Procedures

 
These genres help to create a community. Through the Call for Proposals, we define ourselves with some shared words and perspectives. (This year, it’s Cultivating Capacity, Creating Change.)  Through giving us name badges with big first names, the organization tries to create a chummy community, where “big names” mean first names, not important people. (But those tiny last names on the name badges drive me crazy, not because I’m stalking Andrea Lunsford or Asao Inoue or other superstars but because I can’t remember the last name of that person I met last year and how can I introduce her to the graduate student I’m with if I can’t read her tiny last name on the stupid name badge?)
 
But one of the things that’s interesting to me is that these genres don’t necessarily create a community through all of us participating in them. Many of us attend the Opening General Session and hear the Chair’s Address, but not all of us. Most of us attend presentations, roundtables, and workshops, but not all of us and not the same ones. Most of us browse the books in the book exhibit, but not all of us.
 
Still, there’s the sense that this is us—the books and the talks and the speeches and the awards and even the business meeting. What all those genres do is declare us a group, a community.
 
Even if we don’t attend the Chair’s Address, we hear echoes of it all through the conference rooms and hallways conversations—and it’s later printed in that journal I mentioned.  We don’t hear the same presentations, but we hear some presentation (or I expect most of us do). We’re experiencing the same conference.
 
There’s some thought that the conference has gotten too big. It’s hard to keep that community feeling going among 3,500 people. Smaller groups emerge through participating in shared genres—through attending special interest group meetings or just attending presentations on the same topic (like genre, history of women’s rhetoric) or type of school (two-year colleges, independent writing programs). 

But as I finish up this (late) post, many colleagues are sharing the news that their flights out of the Northeast have been canceled by Storm Stella and they won’t be able to make it to the conference at all this year. And I’m sad for these people I mostly don’t know. I feel my community diminished. They are colleagues who will be missed, even by those of us who don’t know them. Because we’re a community.
 
Because community.
 
As I head off to Portland (airlines willing), I'll be participating in many other genres--the informal, unstructured ones I share with closer friends and colleagues. Greetings, conversations over breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks. Accounts of our last year.  Jokes. And stories. And more.

But those closer relationships don't diminish the relationships of the larger community. In fact, they exist precisely because of the genres that enable the larger community to exist. Those friends and colleagues are ones I met through our shared profession, our shared school or interests. We began as part of a larger community, then became colleagues, then became friends. And that larger community exists, and shows itself, through its genres.

Because genre.

So if you're reading this blog and you make it to Portland, please do stop me and say hello. After all, we're colleagues in a shared community. And hey, you've read my blog!

And if you're not part of this community, you're part of many others, and I bet some of them are communities whose members you don't know but whose genres you share--fellow gardeners, baseball fans, or caregivers. We may not know all the individual members of our communities, but we know something about them. They're us.