Style starts with being aware of your reader. This is why we have stressed the importance of presenting your ideas in an orderly way in an essay, and why you should always be striving for correctness. You should never be prepared to tolerate sloppiness or laziness in the composition of your work. Every essay you write is the equivalent of a job interview. It is a performance where you have to put on your best clothes, if only for the day, and behave in a way that is designed to impress. You want to be seen at your best. Just as turning up in your most comfortable old clothes for a job interview would be inappropriate behavior, certain fussiness over making sure that sentences are well constructed and well presented is essential in an essay. In this way you will ensure that your writing fits in with the pattern of standard English, the norm in education, business and the professions. Your reader expects to be able to understand what you write, and also expects that you will be trying to communicate efficiently. None of these points, however, should be worrying, for, as we have stressed throughout, there are a very small number of rules about writing that you need to follow; if you know how to construct and punctuate a sentence, you can be sure that you won’t go far wrong.
There are, though, other aspects to writing that it is useful to be aware of. Consider this sentence:
The reader who immerses himself in Wordsworth’s poem feels that he has gained a sense of the importance of the poet’s relationship with nature.
This, of course, raises the question of gender in writing: the author has identified the reader as a ‘he’, so excluding half the population. The reasons for avoiding sexist thinking of this kind have to do with recognizing that language is a very powerful instrument for shaping the world we live in. The effect of using ‘he’ not only makes women invisible, but also, implicitly, suggests women are less important than men. Often this may be a matter of unconscious bias: a student, for example, writing an essay about the education system might use exclusively male examples, or a student writing a politics essay might write as if the central roles are the natural preserve of men. It is important to recognize that such bias, even if it is an unconscious bias, is no longer acceptable in academic work. There is, too, another side to this. At university you are meant to be looking at things from new angles, considering things in ways that you might not have done before. If you use sexist terms you are, essentially, clinging to a traditional world-view; if you consciously avoid sexist language, this is a way in which you can make yourself aware of how you are trying to shift your ground, how you are identifying with the need to look at things in a way that breaks with old habits of perception.
That, however, is vague and general advice. What is it, more precisely; tin you need to be alert to in writing an essay? First, never use the term ‘he’ on its own in the way it was used in the sentence above about Wordsworth. An alternative is to use ‘he or she’, or ‘she or he’, or even ‘s/he’, but a more sensible answer is to construct a sentence where the personal pronoun, not required:
The result of immersing oneself in Wordsworth’s poem is a feeling of gaining a sense of the importance of the poet’s relationship with nature.
That is one way of replacing it, although it would be even better to cut out; much of the waffle in the sentence:
Wordworth’s poem offers a sense of the importance of his relationship with nature.
Here is another good reason for avoiding sexist language; forced to rephrase a sentence, you might well be surprised at the kind of brevity you can achieve, brevity in which not a word is wasted and where the main point comes through more clearly.
You should aim to avoid any discriminatory language that is language showing bias against any group. This isn’t a matter of ‘political correctness it’s a matter of thinking who your reader might be. This is, again, a case of stepping outside inherited patterns of thinking. Do not, for example, make the assumption in your writing that doctors and airline pilots are male, while nurses and cabin staff are female. Avoid stereotyped terms for describing people: for instance, the idea that males in positions of authority show qualities of leadership, whereas women are bossy. Rationality is not a virtue that is peculiarly associated with men, and women do not possess special qualities of intuition. If you think about it for a moment, can you see in how many subjects rejection of these old assumptions will enable you to consider issues in a fresh and original way? Obviously one should avoid terms such as chairman (use chairperson or chair), policeman (police officer), and lady (woman). In a business letter, use the person’s name if possible. If you do not know it, and are unsure of the gender of the person you are addressing, use ‘Dear Sir or Madam’. The salutation ‘Dear Sir’ maintains a redundant perception that the sphere of business is the exclusive preserve of men.
As we have noted above, the problem of how to avoid ‘he’ and ‘him’ is often solved simply by changing the structure. For example, by switching to a plural pronoun.-
Each student must complete his assignments before the vacation.
It would be much better to reconstruct this sentence as follows:
All students must complete their assignments before the vacation.
Or the sentence can be changed to the passive:
All student assignments must be completed before the vacation.
We hope that what we have said sounds totally reasonable. What we have tried to explain here is simply a matter of good manners, of showing consideration, of not gratuitously insulting or patronizing any person or group. But as we have also attempted to show, making the effort in respect of something like this also has benefits for you as a student. It will help you think in different ways; this kind of attention to the detail of language will also make you alert to the resonance of words, to just how judiciously the words have to be selected in an essay, to how language carries values and overtones. This takes us on to our next topic, which is judging the appropriate tone in which to write.