Many students think that the indefinite pronouns
“everybody”, “everything”, and “everyone” are plural. This is not true. These
pronouns are singular. Think of them as “every single thing.”
However, because these pronouns are singular, a conflict
arises when a personal pronoun refers to them. For example, consider the
following sentence:
Everybody brought his
jacket to the hike.
Here, the personal pronoun “his” has “everybody” as its
antecedent. Many people think using “his” or “her” alone is biased toward one
gender. A common solution is to use “his/her”. Another solution is to change
“everybody” to a plural pronoun so that the personal pronoun following it can also
be plural. This way, it would be referring to both genders at the same time
because the pronoun is plural. Then the sentence would read,
All of the people brought their
jackets to the hike.
It is however, incorrect to say "Everybody
brought their jackets to the hike," because “everybody” is
singular, so the pronoun following it has to be singular, too. Unfortunately,
this is an extremely common mistake.