My niece Jessica is going back to college. She started last week, and she called me up a couple of times since then. The first time was to tell me about her courses and her first day, and the second time was with a question.

I like that she is calling me because it gives me a different perspective than I normally have as the instructor of a college course.

Although she is my niece, she is only five and a half years younger than I am. If I don’t count a few false starts, it’s been a while since she has been in school. She’s nervous about it.

She called with a style question the other day — does she need to put an article in quotations? And I had a hard time answering that question because it depends. Are you using MLA or APA? Do you need to cite pages like an academic paper or is it more like a journalistic style where the citation is informal? So she was asking what you would think would be a simple question, and I had a hard time answering her because I didn’t know what would be right for her teacher.

But in the process of asking her question, Jessica read me the first line in her essay. She did something in her first sentence that drives me batty, and I suspect it is a personal issue. As in, it grates on my nerves but probably not someone else’s nerves. She wrote:

In this essay, I am responding to the article, “blah, blah, blah.”

My problem with this set up is that it refers to the actual essay. It’s supposed to be an introduction, and the purpose of an introduction is orientating the reader to the subject matter not to the structure of the text itself. I guess it reminds me of walking into a classroom where all of the items are labeled to help teach young students to read. I also have a problem when students refer to the actual assignment for similar but slightly different reasons. When you write “in this essay,” you are stating the obvious, and it actually happens a lot in academic writing, but it usually isn’t in the first sentence. It is one of the reasons I struggle with writing in an academic tone. To me, it implies the author thinks the reader is too dumb to get it, although I suspect I am in the minority with that interpretation.

The real offender, in my opinion, is the sentence that refers to the assignment. This is because the reader needs to know the assignment in order to completely understand the essay, and I believe an essay should stand by itself. Keep in mind, I’m talking about the first sentences of an essay. An example of this would be the following sentence:

I agree with the author because of x, y, and z.

OK, what author? Agree with what? This might be OK for a written short answer, but it isn’t appropriate for an essay.

Right now on the WPA listserv (an e-mail list for writing program administrators and instructors and grad students too), there is a discussion about the pronoun one and whether students should use it and/or be taught to use it. And I am not a fan of “one,” but it has its place. But the discussion brought up something I do struggle with as a writer.

When you use a pronoun, and you want to blur the gender, you have the horribly politically correct options: he/she, he or she, or even s/he. For the record, I hate all three options, and I won’t use them. And since I have a journalism background, I tend to use the singular “they,” which is acceptable in speech and journalism, but it can still make some people cringe. Language, however, evolves, and I would argue that this use has evolved into acceptable use. I also recognize not everyone will agree.

When I first began training to tutor writing, I had to write an essay about my thoughts on tutoring. It was an impromptu essay, I believe, and it was pretty much error free. Months later, I found a copy of my essay in my mailbox in the tutoring center. Someone had taken a red pen to it, marking every time I used the word “they” as a singular pronoun. (I also think that teachers using a red pen to correct papers has almost (but not completely) been evolved out of existence.)

That someone turned out to be another tutor who doesn’t have any formal training, but she has been a tutor for a long time. I learned my use of they had prompted a conversation in my absence among the tutors. The lady that stuffed the corrections in my box was apparently appalled by my use. Another one defended me and pointed out my journalism background.

And yes, I had done it deliberately because it is what I prefer. I also prefer to never see the word I in lower-case.

But is the pronoun one OK? I think of ways it is used. No one can argue with this use, for example. I for one certainly wouldn’t. But the use of one often inspires one to think of a stuffy uptight person, possibly a woman, wearing glasses with puckered lips who is looking down her nose at the lowly uninformed audience. It reminds me of that joke about prepositions and the uptight society woman from the north: ala “where y’all from?” And there might be times I want to be able to create that type of feeling in a piece of writing. This ain’t one of them. (OK, in case you missed the smiley, the use of ain’t was for effect.)

So what is your pet peeve or stumper?