Welcoming the singular they

Until recently, the APA discouraged the use of the singular “they” in place of gender-specific pronouns, or avoiding the issue altogether by rephrasing the sentence. With the new 7th edition, the APA has revised this rule to allow the use of the singular “they” in circumstances such as where the persons gender is unknown or irrelevant to the context, or when you do not know the correct pronoun to use. You can read more about this new approach here and compare to the older guidelines here.

When writing, we often do not know a persons gender or their pronoun/s and can only make assumptions based on their name (and as a person with a gender-neutral name, I can confirm that this approach fails regularly!).

This is a welcome change to the rules to promote inclusivity.