2010/1/30 David Davis <feline1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Using "their" here is a fairly commonplace phrasing. > One way to rationalise it is that imagine the sentence with a person's name > instead: > you would write ".but you sense that John is trapped within. You can almost > hear their desperate cries for release." > But by choosing "John" as your noun, you're implicitly favouring "someone". If instead we use "a dog", then "their" sounds silly, and "its" would be correct. :) And if we use both -- "you sense that John or a dog is trapped within" -- we're back where we started; do you use "their" or "its" as the pronoun? I actually kind of think "its" works better... IMHO, YMMV, etc. -- Tim Pederick