Paul, A frustrating question it is. The sentence is from a passage on home health nurses which I am preparing for an edition of the KISS grammar game. It's paid for by a grant, and will be available for free on the net. (The accompanying biology edition is already mainly there.) In any case, the nursing passage is filled with this problem. I decided to keep the passage just as I received it, because in the context there are specific reasons for its [the problem's] appearance. I discuss those briefly and suggest that teachers may want to use the passage (13 sentences) specifically as an exercise to discuss the "she/he" problem -- which I think partially accounts for the singular/plural blurr. If this is incoherent, I'm up early and not awake yet. Sorry, Ed >>> "Paul E. Doniger" <[log in to unmask]> 06/24/98 08:34pm >>> Dear everyone, I sure have missed these questions. Thanks to Edward Vavra for opening the discussion. I hope that it doesn't stop here. I do have one concern about the sentence in question. Was no one else troubled by the pronoun reference problem in the absolute phrase (singular *patient* = plural *their*)? Have we really begun to accept a plural pronoun for a singular antecedent to establish gender neutrality, avoid using more than one pronoun (e.g. *his or her*), or avoid making all our antecedents plural? As a writing teacher, I often find myself forcing my students to struggle with this frustrating question. Looking forward to your answers, Paul E. Doniger