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David Weber uses a consistent convention in his Honor Harrington books where the speaker uses their own gendered pronoun to refer to someone else when they don't know their gender. (Even if the rea...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:21:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34478 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Jontia
·
2019-12-08T08:21:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
David Weber uses a consistent convention in his Honor Harrington books where the speaker uses their own gendered pronoun to refer to someone else when they don't know their gender. (Even if the reader does know that information.)
> "The opposing Admiral really knows her stuff." said {female character}. "I agree he's got us on the ropes." responded {male character}.
This would obviously only help you assuming you are always writing from a human character's perspective. In speech a member of the alien species could always follow the previous speaker's convention.
As others have suggested you could also adopt a completely different set of pronouns. Wikipedia has some suggestions; [Third Person Pronouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Summary), I personally have always liked Xe, Xem and Xyr.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-03-21T16:18:01Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 2