Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Gender genie for writers ...


I've done nothing but work and be sensible all day so now it is time for a coffee break and a bit of fun.

The Gender Genie is an interesting site.

'Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.'

You type in a paragraph of text and see if the program thinks you are male or female.
This is particularly useful for writers. We know if we are male or female but ...

Say you are writing from the view point of a character. You are female and the character is male. Do you have the right tone for the character. Is his inner narrative coming across as male enough? This site will tell you.

I've done it several times with character pieces. A stuffy male academic was interpreted as female. But I think this was a good result because it meant the tone of his inner narrative was in character.

Writing in a different gender ... do you wonder if you have it right?

2 comments:

Thoraiya said...

That is really cool, Rowena. Thanks...and I'm sure I'm destined to waste lots of time here.

I tried two thousand-word slices of text from a story written from two POVs, one male and one female.

The female POV, I got a 19:10 ratio = very female.

The male POV, I got a 13:12 ratio = still female, but CLOSE to tricking it into thinking the writer was male!

Thoraiya

Rowena Cory Daniells said...

Thoraiya,

Don't feel bad about the male scoring 13:12. It all depends on his character.

If he is a shy sensitive poet, he's going to score higher on the female quotient.

Of course, if he is a Rambo clone, you have problems! :->