Pronouns

Understanding and automating pronouns in AllDrafts documents.

Every Person entity has a list of four pronouns associated: the subjective, objective, possessive, and reflexive forms. (We use possessive determiner, not possessive pronoun, because the former is what appears in contracts. So no 'hers' or 'theirs'.)

There is a Pronoun subfield available on any field, and the Format allows the choice between the four types for rendering. So, for example, if you create a field named Party and set the type to Person, you can also make fields for the Party.Pronoun subfield, and they will render with the appropriate pronoun once the Party is set to a Person, as specified by the format.

As a special case, the Party.Pronoun subfield does NOT render as Party.Pronoun when empty, but rather as the male and female pronoun pair, e.g. he/she or his/her, etc. (While the male and female pronoun pairs act as easy-to-recall shortcuts for the four types of pronouns, the system will always render the appropriate forms.)

As a shortcut, and to avoid needing to remember the grammatical labels, you can type Party.he/she, Party.his/her, etc. to choose both the subfield and appropriate Format for type of pronoun (where 'Party' is the field name that will contain a Person).

Example

If the Party field is set to the person Taylor Smith, whose pronouns are set to they/them/their/themself:

Then the paragraph will render as:

If Taylor Smith's pronouns are set to she/her/her/herself, the fields will render as:

Preset Pronoun Types

AllDrafts allows any four values to be set at the pronouns for a Person. If the first name of a person is strongly associated (based on government birth records) with the male or female gender, AllDrafts will guess the gender as a timesaving convenience. But any values can be set, and if only the first two are specified, the other four will be inferred.

The following sets are preloaded into the system: