I'm having way too much fun today learning that I write like a boy. Spoiler alert: I am not a boy.
This comes about as a result of a conversation with a friend, wherein I mistakenly called a male author a her based on writing style. She called me a sexist (it's kind of her m.o.), and then analyzed his writing to find that he did write like a girl. Redeemed!
Since then, I've been putting piece after piece after blog post into the above-analyzer. At best (i.e., most feminine) I write like a weak male. Possibly European.
I'm intrigued.
You can read more about the gendered writing here. And if y'all have long enough samples, I'm curious as to how you write.
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Sexism in the tools: The system generates a simple estimate (profiling). While Gender Guesser may be 60% - 70% accurate, it is not 100% accurate. This is better than random guessing (50%), but should not be interpreted as "fact". In particular, men should not be offended if it says you write like a girl.
Why a woman shouldn't be offended if she is told that she writes like a boy, I don't know. Or rather, I don't know why a writer if either gender shouldn't be praised for his/her expressive range rather than exclusive conformity to gender-based stereotype.
I was bothered by that, as well. Why look for offense when you can be praised as a chameleon, instead?
But now I know why it's been so hard for me to write a romance novel?
There's also a difference between reporting or discussing personal experiences. I'd say 'Rel may seem "male" just based on what she is assigned to as a journalist. If she's about companies she doesn't normally frequent, it may be distanced.
I know guys, though, who write thoughtful, introspective LJ posts that could be considered more feminine. I definitely have "feminine" if you consider my blog is obsessed with my personal relationships, but that's just my concept of what blogs should be.
Maybe? This study is kinda stupid.
Sorry to leave a second post, but the Word Verification just appeared as "imwthpoo". Heh. I'm with poo.
First: Totally amused by your word verification.
Second: I would agree, but I think the point of it is to remove content and look at conjunctions and sentence patterns and the like. I put in a story about Home Depot, which I wasn't surprised came out masculine, but also one about depression, one about shopping, and one of my longer blog posts. It's not a huge sample size, but it was a range of things I've written about -- some personal, some not; some about traditionally male or female interests, some not.
I'm not saying that it's right or wrong or good or bad, just that I put in more than just one story about a company I cover. If nothing else, I'm intrigued by the idea that we (and by that I mean me, as a reader, considering my comments to Bek) identify things as male- or female-written based on things other than content. It's more than just the fact that it's thoughtful, or about personal relationships (or, in this case, about cooking). It's the way the thoughts are organized and the words that are chosen to express those thoughts that lean one way or the other in perception, if not in reality, regardless of the medium.
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