Gender tone in writing · 8:11am Jul 8th, 2012
Something I found a few years ago just popped on my radar. The Gender Genie is a website the purports to be able to tell the gender of the author based on a sample of their text. I stuck in my latest chapter of 'Oh to be Old Again' in idle curiosity.
Female. Huh. Chapter before that? Male. Let's see what it gives for a wider selection of my work (in chapter order):
'Oh to be Old Again;' Female, female, female, male, female.
'Sins of Our Sisters:' Female, female, female.
"TCB: Why?:' Female, female, female.
I stopped here. Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad or wrong about 'female' writing. Except I don't really think such a thing actually exists. A certain writer has a tone and a cadence and a style that exists, yes, but to try to somehow classify that as male or female is trying to impose a gender concept on something that is beyond gender. Writing is one of the few communication tools that exists where you can reach out to others outside the bounds of cultural or socially-based preconceived notions of how one must, should or will act. If I didn't say I was male, early 30's and heterosexual no one would know! And yet, does it really even matter?
Of course not. Things like this 'rustle my jimmies' in a way that is rare. It seems like it's 'trying to go beyond' the labels and mannerisms preset for us by our culture and society but in reality, it's working only to reinforce those boundaries.
Anyway, I just thought it cute that the word 'the' is somehow, in some manner, considered masculine. 'It' is also masculine, how very strange.
im scared to do this with one of my stories for warhammer...
It is because the majority of characters (as you do use the ponies of course) are female, and are main characters. I don't think the guessing program is meant to work with fan fiction.
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Actually, I've also run through some male-centric original pieces of done. Again, three out of four came out female. One of the many problems is that the words 'me' and 'myself' are labeled as female in fiction works. Almost any first person view piece will kick off as female.
And I can see what you said happening in SooS, maybe. But OtbOA and TCG Why? are both written from the male perspective. The way the Gender Genie works is a basic word count. It counts how many of particular words you write, assigns those words numerical values and tallies up the totals of 'male' and 'female' word usage. The way they got those words is they tallied up the word counts of several male and female writers and saw a statistically significant difference in how often the genders used these so-called 'male' and 'female' words. So the data is valid, to a point, but to make a claim that you can identify the gender of an author with this statistical fluke is bad science.
And what if I wrote a piece from a female's perspective, completely original? It's probably also be misidentified as female simply because of the character and viewpoint. If something as simple as a choice of character gender and viewpoint give false readings, the entire concept should be called into question.
Eh, it just rubs me the wrong way, I suppose. Try as I might, I cannot fathom how anyone can think this type of data-farming can be at all valid.
If it just uses word counts its crap anyway. There probably are many trends, but counting words is no way to find them.
The site is probably just to be stupid, and get views for its ads. Did the site have ads?
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Course it did. The actual site was from 2003, I think I found it/was linked to it in 2004 or so. Been kicking around in my 'YE OLD BOOKMARKS' from back when I had Mozilla on NT. Man, has it really been 8 years? Anyway, I think I found it interesting at the time but now that I look at the idea of it all, I find it ... humiliating. As a writer, amateur though I may be, and as a human.
"Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author." Actual universities were doing studies on this. Probably the soft-science Sociological departments. <EDITOR HAS REMOVED RANT HERE, INSTEAD HAVE A PICTURE OF FLOWERS>
hdwallpaperpics.com/wallpaper/picture/image/2113650-Waterfall-Pretty-Flowers-0.jpg
The intention of gender genie is mostly, from my POV, a device to see if your mindset is closer to that of classic male or female... Example, men will use more curse words and. Iolent language than women, or such is at least the general stereotype, while women are more descriptive I the emotions.
Now, being a person who excels in writing violent, scary thigs, I challenge myself to write emotion and not stop at just "kill annoying thing with pointy thing in a creative way". My fic I'm working on will be a mostly emotional piece, for example.
Anyway, gender genie works off of stereotypes. Don't believe me? Plant several evisceration related words in it. You'll get male. Put several words with emotional meanings, you'll get female, regardless of context.
Oh, and I adore reading your rants. Like that one with... Oh who was it? Crap, I don't remember, but it was biblical. Went on for like... A week?
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3/4 of my first person chapters of original writing (not fanfiction) was processed as male, so that can't be it.