Gendered writing styles?

ooo er, adjectival phrases and adverbial clauses.

writers
My mother and father actually got into a very heated argument over Harper Lee. My father insisted he could tell a woman writer immediately. My mother had probably read the dust jacket and simply sat back for the big melee.

Heh!

Early on at Abuzz I was annoyed that I wasn't being taken seriously in the politics forum and I opened another, "male" account. I didn't change my writing style, just said what I wanted to say under this other name. All the guys thought I was a guy, too (and took me a lot more seriously, hmph).

Re: writers


Ha! I had a similar experience with a friend of mine who made a similar claim, except about male writers, and the book he used as his first example was George Eliot's Middlemarch.

When I first joined A2K, I used the name "Visitor" along with a nonrepresentational avatar. Lola and several others mistook me for a male. I was amused for a couple of weeks.

The first forum I belonged to was abuzz. I registered with a name that was not gender-specific. Almost everyone assumed I was a man. At first I didn't care one way or the other. Then it got to be annoying, so I added "Roberta" to the old name.

One person accused me of lying about it. He and I had gotten into some heated discussions in a baseball thread I started. Whatsamatter, guy? You don't talk baseball with goils?

As a longtime English teacher and writer, I have studied syntax and diction and tone and choice of subject matter up close and often, and I would never say that I can tell whether a piece of writing is by a male or female.

However, were I to figure in the age of the writer--and the age were young, and the writing were unusually good, I would say that there is a better than even chance that the writer is female. This is simply because, on average, the best young writers I've worked with are female, and I have come to believe that girls mature more rapidly than boys intellectually as well as socially. Also, girls tend to be more complexly verbal than boys.

Strangely, among professional adult writers, one can sometimes tell the sex of an author because he or she is "writing to stereotype." These stereotypes are false, but they are widely held by the reading public. For example, a great many readers believe that women writers are characterized by a slightly "gushy" style. This is baloney, but, hey, if a woman wants to write to stereotype for a specific project, she'll do it, and many readers will perceive her work as typically feminine. Of course, men can write purposely to the female stereotype; I've seen this done, and their audience assumes the writing is done by a woman. This is just the beginning of the games. For example, there are people who are so familiar with the popular stereotypes that they can write like a man who is TRYING to write like a woman, but failing. Etc., etc. All the more reason not to jump to conclusions about the sex of an unknown author.

When I've read books that are non-fiction, and trying to teach the reader something, I've noticed that the author can either personalize the writing, or make it factual, like a textbook. When I say personalize, I mean, "So, John saw that when he'd come home late his family would..." In other words, a story was made up to teach the reader whatever.

Male authors may write this way, and female authors may write this way (personalize with a story). But, I believe, I usually don't see female authors write like a textbook, other than a purely informational book (e.g., Herbs for Health).

Since, I believe, more women read than men, and may read more self-help type books, a publisher may just want female readers to feel more comfortable, and perhaps specify a writing style to an author?

In effect, the supposed male style of writing, factual, no emotion, may be archaic from the standpoint of selling books.

Are there any female authors on Civil War battles? That would be an interesting test of how it was written.