I've been doing a thing with my writing lately, I wonder if you've noticed it. Hopefully you haven't, because that would mean that it's been unobtrusive and working as intended, but I suspect at least some of you have, and I've been wanting to make a post about it for a little while now. So here it is!

I've sometimes been using gender neutral pronouns to refer to characters that don't actually identify as those pronouns. You can see this easily in my most recent story (to date) of Peril Pics, where Caryl and the unnamed tiger predator at the start of the story are sometimes referred to as he/him and sometimes referred to as they/them, even though both of them identify as being he/him.

So why do I do this? The goal is to try and improve readability. To make it so that you can read and parse a sentence with the minimum amount of effort, to make your reading experience smooth and uninterrupted by breaks where you have to try and work out exactly what happened in the sentence that you just read.

Specifically, the problem that I am trying to solve is pronoun-antecedent ambiguity in scenes with multiple characters who use the same pronouns.

Or, to put it simply, having multiple he/him's in a story can be confusing sometimes.

Consider the following snippet.

"Switchstep extended his cane out to its full length with a practised flick of his wrist and stepped forwards once more to engage the hero. He stuck immediately, his leg swinging out in a high kick towards his face, but he nimbly ducked under it before swinging his cane in retaliation."

As soon as Switchstep steps back into combat, it becomes quite ambiguous who is doing the kicking and who is avoiding the attack and retaliating. You might be able to work out, from context, that the person who is swinging the cane is Switchstep, but the sense of confusion and ambiguity leading up to that takes you out of the story, and might require you to re-read the sentence to get the action playing smoothly in your head.

Consider, instead, this.

"Switchstep extended his cane out to its full length with a practised flick of his wrist and stepped forwards once more to engage the hero. They stuck immediately, their leg swinging out in a high kick towards his face, but he nimbly ducked under it before swinging his cane in retaliation."

I believe this is much more readable. We have already established the pronoun-antecedent relationship in the first sentence. "Switchstep (antecedent) extended his (pronoun) cane..." The reader is now already primed to think of Switchstep when they see he/him pronouns (at least until a new pronoun-antecedent relationship is established) which means the other party in the story can be referenced using they/them to keep it clear which character is performing which action.

So... yeah. I'm curious as to if any of y'all have any kind of opinion on this at all? Do you think it's neat and it works? Do you think the accurate gendering of characters is more important? Any other opinion? I've never really taken any formal... author lessons? Are there author lessons out there? Probably. So interested in feedback, if you have any.