A refinement of the idea of antecedent clarity involves asking whether the pronouns you use to refer back to your nouns and concepts match the person and number of the antecedent. When that matching happens, we say that the pronoun agrees with its antecedent. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

• I hate it when Zacharias tells me what to do. He‘s so full of himself.
• The Finnegans are shouting again. I swear you could hear them from across town!

In the first sentence, Zacharias is singular, third person, and masculine. The pronouns he and himself are also singular, third person, and masculine, so they agree. In the second sentence, the Finnegans is plural and third person. The pronoun them is also plural and third person.

Person and Number

Some interesting issues with agreements surround indefinite pronouns:

• Every student should do his or her best on this assignment.
• If nobody lost his or her calculator, then where did this come from?

Words like every and nobody are singular, and match, at the level of formal grammar, with singular pronouns. Here are some more words that fall into this category of indefinite pronouns:

Some of these may feel “more singular” than others, but they all are technically singular. Thus, using “he or she” is correct in terms of antecedent agreement insofar as both those pronouns are singular. However, for many academics, correctness is only one value to consider. Another value might be the level of formality they want. Being hyper-correct in your writing will sound very formal and might alienate some readers. The trade-off between being correct and losing readers is a genuine consideration; many academic writers would rather be read by a wider audience than be credited with correctness.

As you may have noticed, the phrases “he or she” or “he, she, or they” can make your sentences clunky, so concerns about stylistic elegance might also outweigh correctness. When such clunkiness threatens, undergraduate writers often write something like this:

• The way each individual speaks can tell us so much about him or her. It tells us what groups they associate themselves with, both ethnically and socially.

As you can see, in the first sentence, him or her agrees with the indefinite pronoun each. However, in the second sentence, the writer has shifted to the plural they, even though the writer is talking about the same group of people. Your writing seems smoother if your agreement is consistent, so one better solution might be to make the antecedent of “they” a plural noun, like “people” in this example:

• The way people speak can tell us so much about them. It tells us what groups they associate themselves with, both ethnically and socially.

Forming a plural antecedent appeals more to most of us than the now unpopular method of avoiding the clunky “he or she” by deciding that the default “neutral” pronoun is “he,” as in this version:

• The way each individual speaks can tell us so much about him. It tells us what groups he associates himself with, both ethnically and socially.

For many people, the sexism underpinning the choice of the masculine pronoun to represent a gender-neutral “anybody” means that they will never use this solution. Others will alternate between defaulting to “he” or to “she” to refer to indefinite antecedents throughout a piece, or will default always to “she.”

Another solution, an increasingly popular one, is to embrace what’s known as “singular they.” We use singular they in speech all the time, in formulations like “To each their own” or “Someone is singing in the corridor. If they haven’t stopped in two minutes, I’m going to have to take drastic measures.” But it has also been used in writing for centuries, including by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens, who all knew a thing or two about effective writing. Singular they was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year for 2015: it provides a stylistically attractive solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral pronoun, and it has been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that “he” and “she” don’t necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. If you think about your own speech, it’s very likely that you use they as a singular pronoun for someone whose gender you don’t know, and don’t want to assume, and it’s also very likely that you respect someone’s chosen pronouns if they use they/them/theirs.

Case

Some of the most common pronoun questions occur with the decision between “you and I” and “you and me.”  People will often say things like “You and me should collaborate on this presentation.” Or—thinking back on the rule that it should be “you and I”—they will say “Dr. Brewer assigned the task to both you and I.” However, both of these sentences are grammatically unconventional in standardized English, although it’s important to note that they are in no way difficult to understand.

Let’s take a look at the first sentence: “You and me should collaborate on this presentation.” Both pronouns are the subject of the sentence, so they should be in subject case: “You and I should collaborate on this presentation.”

In the second sentence (“Dr. Brewer assigned the task to both you and I”), both pronouns are the object of the sentence, so they should be in object case: “Dr. Brewer assigned the task to both you and me.”