I have to admit, I was surprised to hear Gwen Ifill and Bob Woodward, on ABC’s This Week, screw up their pronouns when discussing Going Rogue. It was the pronouns “going rogue” in their exchange:

Ifill: “Women will be drawn to her story—and that’s who she’s speaking to…. These are people who are ignored, who nobody counts into their thinking.”

Woodward: “You can be drawn to somebody’s story—and buy their book and read their book. That doesn’t mean you want them to be President, or that you’re drawn to them to lead.

OK, OK, it’s not fair to expect perfect grammar when people are speaking extemporaneously. But c’mon! These are two of the country’s top journalists!

Gwen, it should be “whom she’s speaking to” and “whom nobody counts into their thinking.”

Bob, please. Isn’t one Sarah sufficient? Somebody is singular, so readers can buy her book and read her book and want her to be president and be drawn to her to lead.

Doesn’t Bob Woodward read this blog? I just wrote about Barak Obama’s rogue pronouns a few weeks ago!

Related posts:

1. Indulging my inner pedagogue

While pundits jumped on the President’s case for saying the Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” I muttered under my breath about his use of “they” when “he” or “she” was called for.

It may be the height of pettiness to demand grammatical perfection of presidents speaking off the cuff. But this isn’t the only time Obama has committed this particular gaff. In a pre-election commercial he said, “Every parent in America wants the same thing: good education for their child.”

Doesn’t a good education include grammar?

Now, I had the same English teachers as our president—at Punahou School, in Honolulu—and to be honest I can’t remember what grammar lessons we got there. But I know that somebody is one of those troublesome indefinite pronouns (like anyone, anybody, everyone, everybody, someone, somebody, no one, and nobody) that is always singular.

I also know that I’m wading into one of the subjects that can make word nerds—not the type usually prone to unbridled passions—go apoplectic. Some recite history and a seemingly infinite string of writers (everyone from Spenser to Shakespeare, from Austen to Auden, from Mark Twain to Rudyard Kipling) who use “they” as a singular pronoun. (See this screed at crossmyt.com.)  Others (like Merriam-Webster’s) argue that if this is how people use the pronoun, we should all accept it. And others, like Grammar Girl, advise us to play it safe by recasting sentences.

I’m interested neither in political correctness nor grammatical hypercorrectness. I’m interested in clarity. Using “their” to refer to a single person blurs lines and introduces ambiguity.

So, Mr. President: We know that Gates is a guy. Don’t use grammar stupidly. Go ahead and say the police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that he was in his own home.

Related posts:

1. Indulging my inner pedagogue

I try not to be a grammar pedagogue here, using this blog mostly for thoughts on writing. But I’m feeling a pent-up desire to go grammatical. Next post: One of my biggest pet peeves and how I wish our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president didn’t mash his pronouns.

Related posts:

1. Is Sarah Palin a She or a They?
2. Presidential pronouns

Flaubert pioneered—or at least put on the map—the “free indirect style,” in which an omniscient narrator suddenly evaporates, entering into a character’s consciousness and representing his or her thoughts. (Check out the market scene with Emma and her lover-to-be.)

Of course, in nonfiction, free indirect style works less well. I call a writer who engages in such shape-shifting a “Wobbly Narrator.” Most writers who jump around from “he” to “you” to “I” are novices who haven’t mastered point of view, or who are afraid to pick a stance toward the material—whether the first-person singular of memoir, the second-person singular of colloquial writers reaching out to readers, or the third-person singular of the reporter concerned with credibly and precisely observing others.

Lemme find some examples of The Wobbly Narrator. I’ll post them in comments—and invite you to do the same.

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1. My APB (all points-of-view bulletin)
2. Indulging my inner pedagogue

But a blog often comes alive because of another aspect of point of view, the literary aspect. The writer sets this point of view by his or her choice of pronouns—I, we, you, he, one, they. I’ve pondered what point of view to use here: The soul-bearing I? The inclusive we, which can also verge into the elegant “editorial we” or the arrogant “royal we”? Or the informal you, capable of sliding from authoritative, even bossy, to irreverent and hip?

Joan Didion once wrote about the act of choosing the first person singular point of view: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act… There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.”

As you see, I’m going for I, not because I’m a secret bully, but because I want you, my reader, to know that this is really coming from me. This point of view will, I hope, let me gush about writing, even as the articles on the site may have the much more reasoned third-person perspective of the journalist and critic.

I’ll post more about this soon, but in the meantime, talk to me about point of view. Have you seen blogs that dare to diverge from the first person? Are there journalists who go for something more revealing than the detached third person? Can you think of a nonfiction writer who uses you like the novelist Jay McInerney?

Who out there is playing with point of view?

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1. Point of view, with attitude
2. The Wobbly Narrator