Grammar Girl here.
Today's topic is generic personal pronouns. Nolan in Victoria, British Columbia, asked the following question:
Just wondering about whether to use she or he in terms of giving examples. Since she was written out of the literature for many, many years, some authors have decided to use she exclusively to make their examples, whereas others maintain that he is the generic personal [pronoun] in the English language.
To be clear, the problem Nolan is talking about is that
nobody really knows what pronoun to use anymore when talking about a
person of unknown gender. Let's say you're writing a sentence that
starts "When a student succeeds …" At this point there's enormous
confusion about whether you should proceed with "he should thank his teacher," "she should thank her