In English, there are three main singular pronouns: he, she, and it. When we’re talking or writing about people, we eschew it; after all, it suggests a non-human subject. This leaves us with he or she, which often are easy to use. We use he for male subjects and she for female subjects.

This is all easy enough, but there are two times when neither he nor she seems the right word choice. The first is where the gender of the subject does not matter. This situation comes up frequently in legal writing. In explaining a rule of law, we often need to include a pronoun. For example, For a plaintiff to maintain a cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress, he must prove the defendant’s conduct is extreme and outrageous. In that sentence, we want a singular pronoun to “match” our singular subject noun of “plaintiff.”

Writers are conscious of which pronoun to choose. Many are afraid if they pick the male pronoun—he­—they will be perceived as sexist. One easy fix to avoid picking a pronoun at all is to make the subject “plaintiff” plural so that we can use the plural pronoun “they” (e.g., For plaintiffs to maintain a cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress, they must prove the defendant’s conduct is extreme and outrageous.). But sometimes that doesn’t work well or we’d rather keep the subject singular. What to do then?

My worst fear has been realized: we can now stop writing in words.

Last week, Chevy issued a press release written entirely in emoji (except for its hashtag line #ChevyGoesEmoji). Emoji are the little graphics that appear all over the digital world. You’ve probably gotten emails or text messages that include them: a thumbs up sign; a little yellow smiley or angry or sad face; a dog; etc. I’ve done a screen capture of a portion of that release that you can see above. According to one journalist, the press release was “utterly incomprehensible.”

The press release introduced the 2016 Chevy Cruze and seemed to be an attempt to appeal to millennials—the younger generation generally born between the early 1980s to the early 2000s. While the company released its English translation the following day, those in media attempted to decipher the emoji version.

I just finished a recent book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. If the names Levitt and Dubner sound familiar, it’s because you may have heard of their popular (and interesting) Freakonomics books (here and here). In the book I just finished, Think Like a Freak, Levitt and Dubner set out to teach readers how to “retrain [their] brain[s]” so that they, too, can “think like a freak.” The book defines what it means to “think like a freak” (it’s not a bad thing; it’s critical and curious thinking with a twist), and offers its step-by-step guide. But one chapter stuck out to me as particularly relevant to lawyers (and law students): How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to Be Persuaded.

Now, the easy thought here is that this advice will apply to brief writing. And, yes, that’s true, but I think we can think of persuasion more broadly. Even a lawyer’s “objective” work has an element of persuasion to it. A demand letter must “persuade” its reader to comply; an internal office memo must “persuade” its reader that the analysis is the correct (or at least best) one.

So, what do Levitt and Dubner say?

First, we must “understand how hard persuasion will be—and why” (168).