In order to ensure the documentation is inclusive, avoid assuming

that an unspecified example person is male or female, and think

twice before using "he", "him", "she", or "her". Here are some

tips to avoid use of gendered pronouns:

- Prefer succinctness and matter-of-factly describing functionality

in the abstract. E.g.

--short:: Emit output in the short-format.

and avoid something like these overly verbose alternatives:

--short:: Use this to emit output in the short-format.

--short:: You can use this to get output in the short-format.

--short:: A user who prefers shorter output could....

--short:: Should a person and/or program want shorter output, he

she/they/it can...

This practice often eliminates the need to involve human actors in

your description, but it is a good practice regardless of the

avoidance of gendered pronouns.

- When it becomes awkward to stick to this style, prefer "you" when

addressing the the hypothetical user, and possibly "we" when

discussing how the program might react to the user. E.g.

You can use this option instead of --xyz, but we might remove

support for it in future versions.

while keeping in mind that you can probably be less verbose, e.g.

Use this instead of --xyz. This option might be removed in future

versions.

- If you still need to refer to an example person that is

third-person singular, you may resort to "singular they" to avoid

"he/she/him/her", e.g.

A contributor asks their upstream to pull from them.

Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to those who

learned that "they" is only used for third-person plural, e.g.

those who learn English as a second language in some parts of the

world.