English checking for Grammar Mistake

Hi,

I am trying hard to make a rule for this Each … their mistake…but hard to coin the rule, as I am very new and learning the rule elements…Could anybody help to do it? More accurately, better…Thanks a million…

The wrong case is:
The register has requested that each student and teacher sign their name on the grade sheet before submitting it.

The correct one is:
The register has requested that each student and teacher sign his name on the grade sheet before submitting it.

Thx.

I’m not a native English speaker, but the first sentence sounds okay to me. Could you explain what makes it wrong? This is also a good starting point for an error pattern.

The first sentence is wrong because “each student and teacher” is singular. Therefore, the “their” should be “his/her”.

Check the difference between the first and second sentence. The second is right…

BTW: this first sentence is wrong due to an English Professor’s remark…

Thx.

I guess it’s supposed to be the “singular they”, Singular they - Wikipedia?

To match it, a trivial pattern would look like this:

<token>each</token>
<token/>
<token>and</token>
<token/>
<token/>
<token>their</token>

“” just matches any word. Of course it needs to be tested whether this matches other stuff, too.

We also have chunks, but these are not 100% robust. You can add your text to the box at Text Analysis - LanguageTool to see how text gets analyzed.

I am a native English speaker, and the first sentence sounds okay to me, as well. The singular ‘they’ is permitted almost everywhere. It is less award than she/he, and some prefer it over the possibly gender biased ‘he’.

I can understand…

My concern is actually not about whether the first and second are wrong or not… I just want to know how to coin the rules…

Thx all the same…

@John, getting started isn’t all that difficult. I’d recommend to
(a) take a look at the existing grammar.xml for English,
(b) try the online rule editor (and watch the intro video).