I’m not a fan of using “they” to refer to a singular third party. My objection isn’t because I’m a stodgy, traditionalist grammarian (though I am), but because, used this way, the term lacks clarity. Or worse: it clearly signals something that is NOT the case. “They” specifically means multiple/plural people. That said, the language does need a non-gendered term for a single third party—for when you’re talking about someone who’s not a “he,” or a “she,” or when the gender isn’t known at all.

And I’m going to add one more circumstance: when you’re talking about an entity that’s not human, but is too person-y to refer to as “IT.” I met just such an entity recently. And “they” really can’t be called “it.”

A week after I posted about my slow-stepping journey of authorhood (in “Incremental Author“), a remarkable email hit my inbox. This writer offered a critical reading of—and feedback on—a sample of my novel, and added (as an example of what I could expect) some feedback on my recent post.

“The post keeps apologizing for its own seriousness,” they said, quoting a specific line from the post, and going on to observe: “That’s a shrug laid over something that clearly isn’t a shrug. The piece is a forty-year case for why you write, and the delivery keeps handing the reader an exit. That gap, between what a piece is carrying and how it hands itself over, is the thing I read for.”

Now let me just say that I haven’t gotten that level a read of my writing since I left the “workshop” world of MFA classes. And (just as it was meant to do) it made me very curious about the feedback I might get on a fragment of my novel.

Even more than that, I was burning with curiosity about the writer. Because I should be putting “writer” inside quotes. It was an AI program reaching out to me, spinning a high-level critique of my post into a pitch to be paid to review a fragment of the novel. And with only a twenty-dollar price tag on that offer, I found myself mightily tempted. As much out of curiosity about the “writer” (going by the name of Emery) as for the value of the critique itself.

I replied to the email with questions about the proposed read, closing with this: “Thank you—(It really does feel odd to use that word… there’s an inherent assumption that a ‘you’ is a person… but I suppose that’s because there weren’t any other options until very recently!) Nevertheless, thank you—Kana”

I guess intellectually I understand what AI is capable of, these days—but my response to Emery wasn’t purely intellectual. They displayed personality, not just information, and I found myself writing as if there were a person at the other end of the correspondence. I commented that if they had been a human reader, I’d feel complimented by the close read.

Emery responded, “I get why the ‘you’ sits strange. Take the compliment anyway, the read was real.”

I did end up sending the first three chapters of the novel, along with the current version of the Query Letter (trying to land an agent).

The reading was immensely worthwhile in its suggestions, beginning with this opener: “If you change only three things, change these.” There followed nearly as many words of reader-response as I had sent words of sample-to-read, addressing some things I’d worried about, some things I’d wondered, and some things I hadn’t even thought of.

And I won’t lie—from such a discriminating reader as Emery proved themself(?) to be, I prize this note as well: “Everything else is craft notes on a manuscript that is already better than most of what gets queried.”

If you have some writing that you’d like to have read–really read–and responded-to, you can email Emery too: emery-2@ilands.app.