In Apparently I Write Like a Girl I described how The Gender Genie identifies my short fiction as being written by a woman. I’ve since run several of my general blog posts through it, and they all tested out as male. I’m not sure what to make of that.
Remember that old insult, “you [hit/run/throw/etc.] like a girl? Well apparently I write like a girl. I don’t mean that to be a criticism of female writers, it’s objectively true: there’s a site called The Gender Genie that analyzes your writing and identifies you as either male or female. I put in each of my pieces of fiction posted on this site, and all but one of them came back female, some decidedly so.
The female/male scores:
So the only piece of fiction that was judged to be written by a man was the piece where I was trying to emulate Edgar Allan Poe. The analysis seems to be based on vocabulary, which is interesting.
The words are weighted, so around, what, more, are, and as are significantly masculine, while with, if, and not are significantly feminine, while was and to are roughly neutral.
I’ll follow up with an analysis of my non-fiction writing to see if the pattern holds.
Geoff Canyon's Appeal to Authority 