Let's say I have a sentence similar to
When a scientist publishes results, she must be careful to not enter the incorrect data.
However, I am confused as to what I should use in place of the "she".
Using a "she" to refer to an arbitrary scientist, to me, seems just as weird as referring to an arbitrary scientist as "he", while "they" just seems grammatically incorrect.
I have been told that the grammatically correct, gender neutral form of the sentence would be
When a scientist publishes results, he/she must be careful to not enter the incorrect data.
But, come on, I'm not going to write "he/she" every time I have to refer to someone of unspecified gender.
How do I go about dealing with this? I understand that I could simply rephrase the sentence as
When scientists publish results, they must be careful to not enter incorrect data.
This is what I do in most cases when I am confronted with this problem.
My question is:
What should I do if I want to stay as close as possible to the original sentence structure (for instance, maintaining the singular form of scientist?
What should I do in general when I am confronted with situations like this one? What options are there (e.g. converting to plural)?
