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You may be surprised to find that the following sentence

, after decades of being considered nonstandard, is now considered standard in American written English.

Standard
Every semester, a student leaves the class without their umbrella.

The most common error in pronoun / antecedent agreement is to use a plural pronoun (in this case, “their”) with the singular word it refers back to (“student”) in an attempt to avoid gender-specific language. Recall that pronouns are words such as she, their, her, or him that take the place of a noun in a sentence.

Here, the new third-person singular pronoun “their” refers back to the singular word “student.”

This used to be considered an agreement error, but both the Chicago Manual of Style and the American Psychological Association have changed their standards.

Other standard ways of expressing the idea in the sample sentence above include substituting “his or her” for “their”

or by making the word it refers to plural so that it agrees with the plural pronoun. The Chicago Manual of Style prefers these uses in formal writing:

Standard (Formal)
Every semester, a student leaves the class without his or her umbrella.

Standard (Formal)
Every semester, students leave the class without their umbrellas.

Errors of agreement are often made with possessive case pronouns, and they’re also made with subjective case pronouns like I, you, he, she, it, we, you, and they.

The subjective case pronoun they can also be used with a singular antecedent:

Standard
If someone wants to join the club, they need to bring a check for five dollars.

In the sentence above, the singular indefinite pronoun someone is paired with

the singular subjective case pronoun they.

If necessary, this can be

re-written in a

number of ways, some more awkward than others:

Standard (Formal)
If someone wants to join the club, he or she needs to bring a check for

five dollars.

Standard (Formal)
If someone wants to join the club, that person needs to bring a check for

five dollars.

Standard (Informal)
If you want to join the club, you need to bring a check for five dollars.

Standard (Informal)
If people want to join the club, they need to bring a check for five dollars.

All of the above are correct, but the first two are more formal and the last two

are more informal. Consider your audience as you

consider your use of pronoun / antecedent agreement.