AS Lang holiday homework

Below is the opening of a Guardian article. Read it then write an opinionated blog entry for a blog of your choice e.g. the Huffington Post, Guardian Comment is Free, Red's Talking Point section (e.g.), GQ's politics section (e.g.) or any other reputable blog-hosting site. State your audience before you start. Aim for a brief intro and four paragraphs and include as much gender theory as you can cram in to a blog about how our language is changing/has to change because of gender issues (you can use the idea in the article as well as anything from gender theory you can make currently relevant - use your imagination to work stuff in!). You are being tested on your ability to inform on gender theory while creating a lively and effective blog entry for your audience. Try and hook and keep your audience while communicating subtler aspects of ideas about language and gender. This is the same task you do on Paper 2, section B.

Also revise occupation theories/content and accent and dialect theories/content as we will be using all of these as soon as we come back to do articles and essays. Also keep working on terminology, little and often. Post the blog entry to your blog by Tue 12th April.

Have a good break but remember that this is the time to work hard, not take a full-blown holiday. There are 5 weeks of teaching left before you leave for the exams!

Is it time we agreed on a gender-neutral singular pronoun?

Gary Nunn

Some argue we need one for socially progressive reasons. Others simply want one to perfect their writing. But so far more than a hundred attempts have failed

One use for a gender neutral singular pronoun could be to refer to androgynous robots and androids. Photograph: Alamy

Friday 30 January 2015 09.00 GMT Last modified on Thursday 15 October 2015 16.17 BST

Language, like life, feels easier to deal with if we arrange it into binaries: Wrong/right; Gay/straight; Labour/Conservative. Terms lurking between the two poles are often unfairly maligned. We’re often wary of anything that is neither one nor the other: Justifiable homicide; Bisexual; The Liberal Democrats.

The same goes for him/her. We seem far more comfortable when people are either men or women. The reality is different. There are people who self­-define as neither, as gender-non­binary. To those who see gender as a construct, this makes perfect sense. But the English language fails to reflect it.
A universal gender­-neutral pronoun – something to capture everything between he and she – would resolve this, and other issues. For non-­atheist progressives, it would give them a gender-neutral God. It could describe androgynous robots. A third­ person pronoun would also help us hacks with our word counts and copy neatness; writing his/hers every time (for those of us who on principle refuse to default to ‘his’) feels untidy and inelegant.

For those now considering commenting to suggest that there’s a perfectly fine existing neutral pronoun – “they” – remember that pronouns must match both gender and number. So in the case of single individuals, it’s grammatically inaccurate.