Gender and writing differences
Recently I've been trying to write some better fiction, and roleplay better. Part of that has been to try out characters I've not been good at before. So I went and looked up to see if people had studied and found gender differences in writing. Apparently they have.


Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts (small pdf download)

Communicative style and gender differences in computer-mediated communications

The first tells me that women have more "involved" writing, and men more "informational" (so I guess this email proves I'm a boy!). So women use more often I, you, she and the reflexive forms of those; men more often use we, you, and it. Women in general more often put gender in (he & she), men prefer it, they, etc. Women use more dialogue in their fiction, and in both fiction and non-fiction more often quote others; men do monologues (yay!) Women use present-tense more often, I assume to give more immediacy for that "involved" aim.

The second paper talks about usenet... scary, eh. The authour writes,

Herring has investigated gender and communicative style on several electronic mailing lists [...] In all three studies, she and her colleagues found two distinct styles of postings, which she called "adversarial" and "supportive/attenuated". She notes that men and women use both styles, but that men tend towards adversarial and women towards supportive/ attenuated and the extremes of each are used "almost exclusively by one gender and not the other". In the remainder of this paper, these will be referred to as M- and F-styles, respectively. Since the characteristics of flaming and M-style speech overlap to some extent, Sproull and Kiesler's finding suggests that electronic communications may be more likely to be M-style.
[...]
It is hypothesized that there will be a link between communicative style and participation: women will be less likely to participate in a discussion with a heavily M-style and, conversely, men will be less likely to participate in a discussion with a heavily F-style. If this pattern is seen, it can be inferred that communicative style does indeed differentially affect individuals' choices whether or not to participate in a particular conference above and beyond the influence of topic.

A couple things struck me about this. The first was that the authour's first sentence reinforced what the first paper said. It was, "she and her colleagues", rather than "the authour" as I naturally and thoughtlessly just wrote. The second was "M-style", made me think of women and therpgsite...
So anyway, this is what I'm up to with trying to write and roleplay better... How about the rest of you? I'm sure there are cultural differences, too, but I'd like to try to get a good grip on the gender differences before dealing with them.


- tool to learn where visitors to this LJ come from -