Everyone…Their

Don’t Say: Everyone collects their paycheck on Friday.
Say Instead: Everyone collects his—or her—paycheck on Friday.

Here’s Why: In this case, the agreement problem isn’t the verb. It’s the pronoun “their” that’s wrong. “Their” is plu¬ral, but what the sentence really needs is a singular pronoun to refer back to the singular subject, “everyone.” Your correct pronoun choices in cases like these are “his,” “her,” and “it.” Years ago, using “his” was the standard, regardless of whether the reference was to men or women, and the corrected version of this sentence would have been Everyone collects his pay¬check on Friday. These days, that sort of construction is usu¬ally viewed as inappropriate, unless everyone referred to actually is male. Instead, we have a few choices. Let’s look at a few ways this sentence could be corrected. Instead of Everyone collects their paycheck on Friday, you could say:

Everyone collects his or her paycheck on Friday. Everyone collects his paycheck on Friday. (This as¬sumes all the paycheck collectors are men.)

Everyone collects her paycheck on Friday. (This assumes all the paycheck collectors are women.)

A note on using “his or her”: It may be egalitarian, but it can also get cumbersome. Often the best thing to do is to reconfigure the sentence to sidestep the issue altogether. For example, you might say:

Everyone collects a paycheck on Friday. The employees collect their paychecks on Friday.

In order to cement this down, let’s look at some more ex¬amples of nonagreement and agreement between indefinite pro¬nouns and other pronouns in a sentence:
Instead of Every student was told to go to their advisor, say Every student was told to go to his or her advisor, or The students were told to go to their advisors. Instead of Anyone can get in by showing their com¬pany ID at the door, say Anyone can get in by show¬ing his or her company ID at the door, or Employees can get in by showing their company ID at the door. Instead of Each of the girls was showing how they swam, say Each of the girls was showing how she swam.

Do the “wrong” versions of these sentences still sound right to you? Don’t worry. Many people use constructions such as “everyone...their.” The language may be changing in this area, and it wouldn’t be the first time. English once had both singular and plural forms of the second person pronoun: to ad¬dress two or more people, “you” and “your” were used, but to address only one person, “thou” and “thine” were used. If we still used the singular form in English, we’d get to say a lot of sentences like this: Thou shouldst get thy brakes serviced soon or thou wilt crash thy car into a tree. “Thou” and “thy” gradually dropped out of the language when speakers started to use the plural “you”—a sign of how the language changes.

Today, something similar may be happening with construc¬tions such as “everyone...their.” But for now, “everyone...their” is not considered correct in formal speech or in writing, so you should be aware of alternatives that don’t break the rules.