Wednesday, 24 June 2015

grammaticality - What's wrong with my use of "anyone" and "their" in this sentence?

It might have to do with the formality of your essay. Most formal essays must be written in third person. "Anyone" is not considered formal English appropriate for a scholar essay and is colloquial first person. Rather use "a person could". Same with "their" which in your context is second person. The combination of anyone and their sounds sloppy (not trying to be condescending but objective here).



Rather rewrite the sentence as "Because of how the program works, a person interested in using it needs only to have it installed on their machine.



IMHO of course !

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