Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Male or female?

Still on the gender theme, here is a bit of fun.

I discovered the Gender Genie web page recently ( sorry, I can't remember who led me to it...) and having bookmarked it, I decided to have a go today. It claims to be able to deduce whether a piece of prose was written by a male or female from the language used.

So I entered in one of my blog entries: male. Hmm.

A small ( admittedly smaller than the recommended 500 word) passage from my novel in progress: androgynous...equally male and female!

A whole 2000 word short story, written with the women's magazine market in mind: female. Phew!

Three notable things:

1. Son 2 was well enough to go to playscheme despite having vomited all over the sofa last night! I knew we bought leather furniture for a reason...

2. Arranging for a friend to visit tomorrow so we can catch up on the gossip.

3. A home delivery arriving promptly for once, rather than 10 minutes before the end of the delivery window.

3 comments:

Graeme K Talboys said...

Interesting. Fed in some of the latest Charlie Cornelius chapter and it came out heavily female (so to speak).

OK, I thought. Pleased with that. It is about a girl and purports to be taken from her recounting her adventures.

So I put in a section of one of my spy novels. Female. Even more strongly so. Is that where I went wrong? Should I change the sex of the lead character?

Graeme K Talboys said...

To add to that, I've just fed some bits of my non-fiction through and found they extremely male. Very interesting.

Cathy said...

Glad I'm not the only one who got mixed results, Graeme!