This fun little site, which I found on a friend's blog, swallows paste-ins of texts and tells you, based apparently on an algorithm (which works best on exerpts over 500 words), whether it thinks the author is male or female:
http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php
Have fun! I found out, to my interest, that while my fiction declares me to be overwhelmingly female, my blog posts and essays tip the scale decidedly in a masculine direction. All I can say is, Dr. Price would be proud. So this one's for him.
2 comments:
This is really interesting! I put sections from three different briefs from my Legal Writing class through the "genie" (mine, another female's, and a male's), and they were all declared male. Mine and the other female's were overwhelmingly male, actually -- more so than the male's. Perhaps legal writing emphasizes the qualities that are considered masculine...? I wonder if that could be extended to nonfiction writing in other fields too...
I think that's a reasonable supposition. Considering that the discipline and craft of writing was developed and generally practiced by men for most of human history, a "female" voice has taken longer to develop, and has developed most freely in the genres of poetry and fiction (where, according to Kristevan, the prelinguistic, nonlinear semiotic order can irrupt the symbolic order more easily).
Even as few as thirty years ago, the legal field was predominantly inhabited by men.
I'd like to read that book on which the Gender Genie site was based, though...because words like "where" and "and" are considered "feminine," and words like "the" and "a" are "masculine," and these aren't the kinds of words you're taught to use or not to use in an essay writing class...except for all the "to be" conjugations, two of which are feminine and two of which are masculine. So it's decidedly odd.
But I also noticed that my less serious, more off-the-cuff blog posts tend to be more "feminine"; the ones on which I spend more time turn out more "masculine." So I do think there's something subconsciously masculine in what we're taught is "good essay writing."
Now I wonder what it would look like if it had a poetry genre option...and how male poets would score. Or if the algorithm simply breaks down.
Post a Comment