As recently reported in Yahoo News, Facebook has taken steps to improve its grammatical accuracy. Sentences generated by the social networking website about people in the third person will use he or she in place of their when referring to the individual.

Facebook will also prompt users to select a sex if they have not already.  I got my notice within the last week, and, yes, I have finally selected my sex.  I am now declared a male to my legions of friends on Facebook, and they will be spared the misfortune of seeing:

Paul has changed their profile picture.

Elementary school teachers of English everywhere should rejoice.  Now if only something could be done about loose vs. lose and its vs. it’s.

If you are interested in other topics central to online writing, see a just-published video of me interviewing Fathom’s content manager, Daiv Whaley, about writing & SEO.  Daiv says,

It definitely comes across as amateur and poor when you see a website that’s got a misspelling or bad grammar.  It just really brings the quality of a website down.

Here’s to Facebook–and websites everywhere–improving their quality.