A colleague was praising my writing style. “It’s very clean and neat, like a machine,” she said, laughing slightly at her unusual complement.
“Yes, it, uh, well 10 years of technical writing plays a part,” I said. “Quite frankly, I think I’ve turned into a robot.” Laughing again, a little too heartily.
Actually, I might have turned into… a man. I’ve been playing around today with the Gender Guesser (here), a text analyzer that predicts the author’s gender based on word usage and grammatical choices.
I’ve plugged 5 pieces of writing to the Gender Guesser and it keeps saying I’m a man — with sometimes up to 75% certainty.
To test its validity, I tried some other people’s writing. I did some from the nutty English bloke at 27b/6 (here), and found 3 out of 4 tests identified him as a European Male.
I tried some of the editorial rants from Jezebel (here), which were mostly judged as “weak female” (a wording that would enrage the Jezzies).
I tried some posts from Sarah of Que Sera Sera (here) (though I had to dig a little for some substantive posting, as girlfriend’s been lacking lately) and it was all female. And she’s, like, one of the funniest bloggers ever.
I tried this very post, and the pronouncement was… too few words.
