Oh dear. It's a song by the Kinks. "Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man Oh my Lola ..."
Well that was interesting. I fed it several excerpts. For the most part I was coming off as Weak Male informally, and Male formally. I was certain I'd be picked up as being female when, in fact, none of the excerpts exposed me as such.
My writing mostly came out as 'Weak Male'. One passage, purporting to be from a female character, came out 'Male' Does anyone have any tips on how to write in a masculine or feminine way? I may try to use this tool on a trial-and-error basis, to see if I can work something out.
"Weak emphasis could indicate European." Well, that's interesting... Anyway, took a few excerpts from my latest story and most of them was about 60% male in both formal and informal. Though it did say "weak female" for the informal part of one of them. ETA: In my latest WIP I'm formally a weak female as well. ETA2: Ran a few of my shorter forum posts through it as well and it seems like I either get Female - Male or Male - Female, except for this post where I had Male - Male (with the informal one being 100% male...) My conclusion is that I'm formally a male, but informally female.
I don't think you should conflate a female author's word choice with portraying a female character well, unless the female is the narrator and or you are writing dialogue. And even with those two things, the study did not look at the reader recognizing female character. It looked at the few differences that a male and female author had in word choices in fiction and non fiction writing. We should not assume you can extrapolate conclusions from that which were not tested for.
With several of my blog posts, I keep getting "weak male" or "male", with only one female. And I almost always get the "weak emphasis could indicate European."
Don't take it so seriously. It's a fun tool for laughs, but I would not base my writing on it. If you're genuinely worried about writing unrealistic men and women, rather ask for critique fron actual humans. And if real readers don't have a problem with believing your character is male/female, then who cares what this tool says?
I played around with a few sections of my story and I got mostly weak male or female. However, overall I got weak male. Seems legit.
I'm in the middle of reading the Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark, so far it's excellent. In it he quotes someone as saying concrete nouns ( not vague nouns ) and active verbs without a lot of frills were masculine writing. Although Roy agreed with him, to appear more gender friendly he swapped masculine for muscular. Relabeling it muscular writing. I have no idea if this is one of the deciding factors in what makes something masculine vs feminine though. But I thought it was interesting.
I tried it with a number of passages from several different works. When I hit twenty and it only got it right once, I figured I'd had all the fun I could take for the moment. Oh, yeh. And the writing is not about characters or POV or anything of that nature, it's supposedly about the author him/herself and the writing style - phrasing, word choice, etc. To that extent, there may be some marginal bit of validity to it as, depending upon which genres I write, my style, approach, and delivery are decidedly different. And, in some genres, I present, apparently, strongly male while, in others, I present decidedly female. Which says a great deal about human nature. One has to wonder how some words, phrases, and constructs are more masculine or feminine than others. Why? I have also discovered that I have been able to 'manipulate' my writing style to reflect more gender specificity. Yes. I did that as an experiment just to mess with the program. It's a great game and amusing for a moment but, that's just too much like work.
Now, that's just weird. "Muscular writing." What, exactly, is that, anyway? Writing cursive with a twenty pound inkpen? Using heavyweight paper? Using a 1925 Underwood, 50 lb. cast iron typewriter? And, if you have to move that typewriter around too much, you'll almost certainly become muscular!
This is exactly what I'm doing. I have a female narrator and female characters talking to each-other, so why not think something's a miss when it comes out male? I'm just assuming (perhaps mistakenly) that the software looks for general masculine and feminine traits. I'm don't intend to take it too seriously though.
Weak male on both for me. It also says "Weak emphasis could indicate European." I'm both male and European, so this is pretty accurate. And I'm certainly weak ...
I think if you are interested in using the tool for such a purpose you need to look at the original research, not at the tool. Keep in mind the research only found an 80% correlation. What you need then is to look at the predictive curve. Is it flat, or peaked? What was the standard deviation? Like I said, you are trying to make a tool intended to tell the gender of the author and apply that to the gender of the narrator or character the author is writing about. Those may have some overlap, but you really don't know without a lot more investigation. That conclusion may simply not be supported by the study.
And, I think, this is precisely what Cogito suggested. There seems to be a stereotyping of "male words" and "female words" as though men cannot use those 'female' words and vice-versa. My mother once asked me how I could write so many books. "I could never think of that many words," she said. "I can't either," I told her. "I've got this big book with a bunch of words in it and I use the same ones over and over." Which brings me to my question. "Now, aside from the gender identification specific to many languages (-a/-o endings, etc.), why are some words considered masculine and some considered feminine in usage? And, do the women of the world consider this some kind of bigotry that they don't use this word or that one?"