Final answer:
A 3rd person pronoun refers to someone or something other than the speaker or listener and is used in different cases: subjective, objective, and possessive. It is crucial in maintaining an impartial point of view in academic and literary contexts and includes the current trend towards gender neutrality in language.
Step-by-step explanation:
A 3rd person pronoun refers to others, not the speaker or the listener, and includes forms such as he, she, it, and they. These pronouns take on different cases depending on their function in a sentence.
The subjective case is used when the pronoun is the subject of the sentence (he, she, it, they), the objective case when the pronoun serves as the object of a verb or preposition (him, her, it, them), and the possessive case to show ownership (his, her, hers, its, their, theirs).
Pronouns should have a clear antecedent in a sentence to avoid confusion. In literature and academic writing, the third-person point of view helps maintain a focus on information rather than the writer.
Additionally, there is an ongoing societal debate about the use of gender-neutral pronouns, such as using 'they/them' as singular pronouns to include non-binary individuals.