Nobody Is Perfect! But, Did You Also Know Nobody Is A Singular Pronoun?

My niece, who goes to high school in a far-western suburb (in other words, not York or Willowbrook), had to complete an Honors English project over the summer. Her teacher provided a list of instructions, which included an opportunity to earn extra credit. My niece decided to take advantage of this opportunity.

When I read the instructions for how to earn extra credit, I was a little surprised that an English teacher had written them. The instructions read as follows:
Give your paper to an adult and have them edit it. Hand in your revised paper, along with their comments, and if you make all of their edits, you will earn 10 extra credit points.

While what the teacher wrote is an example of something that’s becoming increasingly popular in American English, it is still grammatically incorrect. The teacher is asking her students to have an adult (a singular noun) edit the paper, but then switches over to plural pronouns (them and their) for the rest of her instructions.

I have noticed that when people don’t know the gender of their subject, they use them or their. If the subject is singular, any pronoun related to the subject should also be singular.

The teacher should have written:
Give your paper to an adult and have him or her edit it. Hand in your revised paper, along with his or her comments, and if you make all of the edits, you will earn 10 extra credit points.

I realize that writing "him or her" makes your sentence wordy, but it is probably the most correct option in this case. I say "the most correct", because there is another option. What I usually do when the subject can be either male or female is pick one gender and roll with it. For example:
The driver of that cab didn’t use his turn signal.

Since I didn’t know if the cab driver was male or female, I used him, which is a singular pronoun. Sure, the driver could have been a female, but we will never know for sure. Using the singular pronoun his is more correct than the plural pronoun their, which is what a lot of people would have used instead.

I am sure the reason that the teacher did not simply pick one gender is because she did not want to raise more questions. If she were to have picked her for example, then it raises confusion about whether a dad could edit the paper—and vise versa. In this case, I would have used him or her; sometime wordiness is better than unnecessary confusion.

Because the teacher used "an adult" as the subject of her instructions, it reminds me that there are also other words we use that are not gender specific, and can be tricky when you are trying to decide if they are singular or plural. In fact, there is a whole class of pronouns that can leave you wondering whether they are singular or plural.

The following pronouns are singular: anyone, anybody, either, everyone, everybody, everything, nobody, no one, one, somebody, someone, and something.

These pronouns are especially tough, because you often use them when you are commenting about a group of people; so remember, when you use these singular pronouns as the subject of a sentence, keep the rest of the sentence singular as well.
Everyone had his [or her] own version of what happened that night.
Nobody knew where he [or she] stood when the test was over.

When I returned the paper to my niece, I pointed out the error for the teacher to see. I felt that if the teacher was inviting me to critique a student’s work, I should be allowed to critique the teacher’s work as well. The teacher responded that the instructions were written by another teacher, and she hadn’t taken the time to proofread them before distributing them to her class.

I guess the real lesson here is don’t attach your name to anything you haven’t reviewed carefully—someone may make you the subject of her blog later!  ;-)