December 18, 2003 ~ Male Writer
Thursday.
Apparently, I write like a man.
I read about an algorithm that analyzes the words that one uses in one's writing to determine the gender of the author and found a website where I could plug in some of my writing to have it automatically scanned and analyzed. (The Gender Genie)
And, no, it doesn't judge by content. A passage about tools, cars, and sports written by a woman could just as easily come up as female as one about make-up, giving birth, and women's fashion. Instead, it uses linguistic clues such as the sorts of conjunctions, articles, qualifiers, and pronouns the writer is using. (I'm fascinated by this sort of stuff). Supposedly, it works to 88% accuracy.
It mentions that it is more accurate with passages of five hundred words or more, so I went through all of my journal entries from November through now and put any entries that were more than 500 words through the analysis (taking out titles, quotes, and footnotes, as those don't qualify as my extended prose), and assigned them the genre of "blog entry."
Out of the twelve entries since November that were long enough, eleven of them the algorithm declared written by a man. Only one, one single entry, was declared written by a woman.
Still not sure what to make of this, though I find it very interesting.
It's been a somewhat stressful week, but it's over now, and I've been feeling rather silly. Someone came to Awakened a few hours ago by searching Google for the phrase "love is a potato", and it sent me into a fit of giggles. What sort of person searches for that, and what exactly are they looking for? Are they hoping for a poetic treatise on how a potato is a metaphor for love? If so, I don't believe love would come out looking too appealing:
Love is a potato.
It is dug from the ground,
and it is brown.
Love tastes like a potato
Starchy and bland
Rather squishy when canned.
Love is a potato,
deep in the earth
causing ... uh.. farmers great mirth?
Yeah, I think I dipped a little too deep into the silly this evening. Some rest tomorrow will be a good thing.
|
