Less Information for Better Microcopy

When someone pauses notifications in a popular messaging app this message appears:

[Name] has paused their notifications

This is clumsy UX writing, because it uses an unnecessary pronouns, which means it’s never going to be right 100% of the time.

The easiest rewrite for the original bit of microcopy:

[Name] has paused notifications

Another option would be to tweak the layout a bit and have a tag right next to the person’s name with the text:

Notifications paused

The best way to manage complex UX writing is stripping out unnecessary information, such as pronouns. This will end up being correct each time, because, logically speaking, a sentence without pronouns can never have the wrong pronoun.

The art of good UX writing is figuring out what information is necessary, how to cut out what’s unnecessary, sound natural, while being easy to understand. Adding an artificial and unnecessary “their” in the middle of a sentence doesn’t do any of that.