“When I write I am neither man nor woman nor dog nor cat.” To her, the notion of female or male writing – écriture féminine ou masculine – was totally void of meaning. I found that remark interesting. I’ve been writing many a summers and this particular statement did make me contemplate as to whether my gender influences my writings.
Initially I chewed and ruminated on this succulent premise then moved on. I surfed the net, in order to get a deeper insight. I came across this equally out of the ordinary website ‘Gender Speculator’, which guesses your gender based on your style of writing, words used in the write up etc.
Studies have shown how gender determines the choice of words, linguistic features, communication strategies and the like. For instance, women tend to use intensive adverbs, more references to emotions, and are particular about grammar and other nuances. Men on the other hand are supposed to consistently use more reference to quantity, employ judgemental adverbs, and are also supposed to be witty and aggressive in expression!!
Take for example, a simple incident like forgetting a purse. Women will most likely exclaim…”Oh! I forgot my purse”. While men may yell…What the f#@#k, or hell where on earth is my wallet? Yet, there is no hard and fast rule that these would be the natural exclamations based on gender. For an equal number of studies if not more have concluded that most of the language features mentioned earlier were adopted by writers irrespective of their gender.
When I was younger and just out of college,. Rajan Narayan happened to be Editor of this paper. I remember he was very liberal and permitted me to go ahead and pen my thoughts just the way I wanted. With no formal education in the field of Journalism, there was neither polishing nor finishing. It was plain, wild and feral flow of pen. Nothing has changed much. But I suppose it did strike a chord for it got a form and shape as “Middles”.
When I look back and reflect, at that particular point of time more than my gender my age influenced the choice of words and the linguistic attributes I adopted. The words were bold, with lavish sprinkle of choicest expletives (of course that were edited), nonetheless they were part of the write up. Moreover the writings were not to impress anyone but to express my thoughts and emotions. And most of the time it was straight from the heart with an attitude of any youngster- ‘Either you take it or leave it or better still learn to live with it’.
So I believe and I may be wrong that ‘age’ can be a significant constituent that determines the linguistic features each author adopts. A factor much akin to gender that can’t be ripped apart from other equally important components such as education, class, creed and other myriad attributes.
Coming back to the website, it claims, ‘the submitted text is evaluated based on formal and informal writings. There are many disclaimers but what I found interesting or rather amusing was under the quick notes it states’ Men should not be offended if it says you write like a girl’. Talk about fragile male ego. Ha!. I could hardly wait to identify my gender based on my writing and guess what, the site declared me to be a ‘Male’. Now, I strongly object to that absurd declaration. For, unlike Nathelie, I (an insignificant writer) takes pride in my gender and certainly am not apologetic.
