Persnickety

As writing consultants I know that we are supposed to help our clients improve their writing. My question is: What is considered going too far? And Are we too adamant? I say this because I was looking over a friend’s paper today and some of the ideas I proposed seemed foreign to this individual. One such example was when a sentence read something like this: In both books, a child is helpless and they are left to survive on their own.” To the naked eye this may seem fine and heck, to the average American it may even sound fine, but it’s not. Proper English teaches us that a subject such as “a child” must be accompanied by the following: his or her instead of their. I noted this mentally but never really addressed this issue to my friend after reading her paper. I do this same mistake in my writing and I have yet to be corrected by a professor. I wonder however if I should have said something. It later occurred to me what if the professor were an English professor who was extremely anal about such grammar rules. On the other hand, what if the professor saw and had said nothing. I know that writing consultants are not the grammar police and should not look for every single grammatical error in the paper, but at the same time if we see a blatant error that the writer mistook, should we not help them by showing them the errors of their ways? I am a little conflicted and I want to know if I should speak up next time, or if I am being too anal.