Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Friday, February 16, 2007
Via Making Light:
The Gender Genie.
Paste in 500 words or so and it will predict the gender of the author. It guessed right about 50% of the time on my fiction. That's fine. I pasted in a variety of passages. A few were from stories that had a definite male POV and I worked very hard to maintain that. As for the non-fiction, it was mostly male. A sample of technical writing was female, but I'm not surprised. Passive verbs abounded, but technical writing (at least in my experience) tends to lean in that direction. It's dry and precise.
The real hoot was a newspaper column I'd written a little over eighteen years ago announcing my pregnancy. Apparently it was dripping with testosterone. Ah, what the supermarket tabloids might make of that one!
Tags: Writing