english summary

Question

Which sentence is grammatically incorrect? a) Everyone should turn of his or her phone before the movie starts. b) All people should at least try to file there taxes on time. c) No one can ever really know their own fate. d) The whole family is getting together tomorrow.

Answer 1

I must disagree with Grant P.'s identification of a) as the sentence that is "grammatically incorrect" on the basis of the use of his or her, which he corrected to their. That is, I assume this was his reason since he put their in bold type, though he also changed the original of to off which is definitely a needed correction. There are two reasons I feel that a) would not be the correct answer to this question:

1. In fact, in traditional grammar using a plural pronoun like their to refer to the antecedent everyone is considered an error since the dictum is that everyone is grammatically singular--note also how it always requires a singular verb, e.g., Everyone is expected to turn off . . .--and therefore the use of a singular pronoun like his to refer to everyone is the only "correct" construction, and being gender inclusive by adding or her or employing similar phrasing (e.g., his/her, her or his etc.) is encouraged on sociological, if not necessarily grammatical, grounds. But like many rules of traditional prescriptive grammar, this one too is often "violated" even in more formal registers, i.e., levels of speech, such that indeed sentences like Everyone should turn off their phone before the movie starts are heard frequently and perhaps more importantly, many if not most speakers of English would hardly bat an eye--or an ear--upon hearing it nor deem it "wrong" or "ungrammatical."
2. For the same reasons that using a singular pronoun to refer to everyone is prescribed, so is it required that no one must also take singular and not plural pronouns, and therefore your choice c), "No one can ever really know their own fate," would actually be incorrect since it employs the plural their to refer to no one. With no one, the traditional analysis goes, the necessity of singular pronouns is even more transparent since one, set off as a word by itself with a space, is by definition singular, and thus I really believe that c) was meant to be the answer choice that is correct for this question. The problem, though, is that trying to comply with the rules of traditional grammar in making a sentence like c) "correct" would involve creating something quite ungainly like No one can ever really know his or her own fate, which probably way more English speakers would reject as "wrong" or "awkward" than would make a similar judgment about Everyone should turn off his or her phone before the movie starts. But still, I would maintain that under the strict if outdated rules of traditional, "correct" grammar, No one can ever really know their own fate has to be considered "incorrect."

 

I note also that your choice b), "All people should at least try to file there taxes on time," is also strictly speaking "incorrect" since it uses the adverb there instead of its homophone their--a very common mistake, in fact--but in this case you may just have copied the choice inaccurately from your assignment. If so, then b) is not otherwise wrong since there (caught myself, I first typed that as "their") are thankfully no agreement issues between people and their.

Answer 2

A.  Everyone should turn off their phone before the movie starts.