Asterisks.com offers some free language pointers and links to online reference sources. For fun, we share some amusing blunders collected by editors.

Using gender-neutral language

Most of us do not consider ourselves to be sexist. However, sexist language is hard to avoid – historically, English is riddled with it.

For example, “mankind”, “the man in the street” and “chairman” may all be seen as offensive because they disregard the female half of humanity, and are becoming less and less acceptable. While not always obvious or easy to pick up, such terms can immediately alienate or irritate a gender-conscious reader.

Some problems are quickly remedied. For example, “mankind” is easily changed to “humankind”; “the man in the street” to “the person in the street” or “the average person”, and so on. Avoid sexist idioms – such as “the world and his wife” – where possible.

Many ungendered phrases or terms such as “chairperson” may seem awkward at first; but they are rapidly becoming the standard. Remember that English is evolving all the time, and a word like “personhole” (instead of “manhole”), which might seem excessive and unwieldy to us now, may be more widely used in the future.

Perhaps the most pervasive problem is the assumption that the representative person is male. For example: “If a client wants to change his account, he must visit his bank personally;” or: “A confident person can talk his way out of any situation.” There are several ways around this problem.

For example:

“Every student must hand in his essay before the set date.”

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