His, Ours, Me, You, Theirs.

In Actionstep you can use merge fields to determine what pronoun will be used based on if the participants involved are male, female or a company or if there is one of them or many.

In this article we will discuss how you can use pronouns to achieve the correct syntax in your documents. This article assumes you have some prior knowledge of how Merge Fields and Merge Field Options work in Actonstep. 

Pronoun Merge Fields

There are three parts that make up a working pronoun merge field. The three parts are the merge field, the option to show what tense you are writing in (first person, second person, third person), and lastly a option to show which party to your matter you are referring to. 

Merge field

There are three merge fields that you can use to insert a pronoun into your document. They are:

• Pronoun1
• Pronoun2
• Pronoun3
• Pronoun4

The one you use will depend on the pronoun you are trying to use (see the table below for help choosing the pronoun you want to use).

The option to show the tense

Once you choose the pronoun, you then add  an option to the merge filed to show if it should be in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd person by adding either:

• |pn=1st
• |pn=2nd
• |pn=3rd

To the merge field.

The option to show the party you are referencing in the merge field

Lastly, you will add in a pt= option to show which content the pronoun will reference. For example, if you are referring to the client you would use pt=Client.

But what should you use?

Often you know what you want to write but don't know what tense or pronoun type you want to use. That's where the table below comes in useful.

In this table, use the right-hand column to find the word that you would want to use in your document. Then look at the columns to the left to tell what type of pronoun and person you are wanting to use.

Have a scroll through all the options and compare the results for plural user (more than one person loaded as a party type) and the gender to make sure the types will work for each different combination.