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Word of the Day

Friday, February 20, 2009

My Secret Revealed

I found this thing online called the Gender Genie that purports to be able to tell by the words used in a piece of writing what gender the author is. I entered in a piece of my novel and then a piece of my blog (the entry about the tie). Both times the Genie read me as male, which I find interesting. It bases its assessment on words that you wouldn't think would be gender indicators, such as should, we, with, not (female) and the, below, at, and it (male).

I'm going to be cutting and pasting random things in there for the ten minutes or so, trying to figure out if it's just a bunch of hooey or if I really have a "masculine" style.

I have no pictures today. I'm working on a dress, but Brandon took the digital camera with him in the truck.

*** AN UPDATE ***

After fiddling with the Gender Genie awhile, I think it more or less consistently identifies certain blog authors as male or female, but it has very little do do with the actual gender of the author. Some females are consistently predicted as male, and some male authors are consistently predicted as female, and a slight majority of people's gender is predicted correctly and consistently.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL different posts come across as different genders, with the male exceeding the female, and even the female posts are barely winning.

In my fiction writing, it's male. But it's also intentional: because I write spec fic, I present myself and try to come across as a man (and have a male pen name). Chick lit, I dunno where that came from, but I don't sound all girly in real life and I write like I talk.

It's whacked is my best guess.

bee said...

Wow! This is weird stuff. I bet Holly would be interested in doing this experiment.