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Attempts by economists at defining full employment have been met with failure. 4a. Complaints by editorial writers about voter apathy rarely offer suggestions about dispelling it. 4b. Although critics claim that children who watch a lot of television tend to become less able readers, no one has demonstrated that to be true. 5a. The loss of market share to Japan by domestic automakers ­resulted in the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs. 5b. When educators embrace new-media technology, our schools will teach complex subjects more effectively.

1b. The CIA had fears that the president would send a recommendation to Congress that it make a reduction in its budget. Most readers think (1a) is clearer than (1b), but not much. Now compare (1b) and (1c): 1b. The CIA had fears that the president would send a recommendation to Congress that it make a reduction in its budget. 1c. The fear of the CIA was that a recommendation from the president to Congress would be for a reduction in its budget. 46 Lesson 4 Characters 47 Most readers think that (1c) is much less clear than either (1a) or (1b).

We could also try impersonal abstraction, but that creates its own problem: Failure to consider ethnicity may lead to unexpected responses to words considered innocent of bias. Finally, we can alternately use he and she, as I have. But that’s not a perfect solution either, because some readers find she as stylistically intrusive as he/she. A reviewer in the New York Times, for example, wondered what to make of an author whom the reviewer charged with attempting to right history’s wrongs to women by referring to random examples as “she,” as in “Ask a particle physicist what happens when a quark is knocked out of a proton, and she will tell you .