UNTIL WOMEN CAN FIND an openly lustful, quick, impatient feral hunger in themselves, they will never be liberated, and their writing…in pallid imitation of the master, will lack that blood congested genital drive which energizes every great style.
—William Gass, 1976
THE FIRST VIRTUE, the touchstone of the masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, ‘They gave him a silver teapot,’ you write as a man. When you write, ‘He was made the recipient of a silver teapot,’ you write jargon.
—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1913
THE FEMALE STYLE I was discovering and defining for myself seemed in many ways more attractive than the masculine style which aimed at and so often led to achievement. Women seemed more responsive, more expressive, more flexible, more considerate, more iconoclastic and more irreverent than men. But were these traits innately, inevitably, biologically a part of women’s nature? Or were they characteristic of any group of people privileged in some ways but excluded from power?…I came to think that much of what I valued as female nature was not nature at all but a style created by cultural circumstances and historical circumstances.
—Phyllis Rose, Writing of Women, 1985
IT APPEARS TO ME THAT the usual style of letter-writing among females is faultless, except in three particulars…. A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.
—Mr. Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, 1818
I WRITE IN SHORT paragraphs because when I began there were always children around, and it was the most I could do to get three lines out between crises.
[Style is] how you say what you want to say in the shortest time available, so you can all go home…. It is rather like the way women conduc tmeetings. I always find that men conduct meetings very long-windedly, they sort of wander off, whereas women get straight to the point, then go home to look after the children.
—Fay Weldon, 2002
…IT WAS DELIGHTFUL TO READ a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter “I.” One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter “I.” One began to be tired of “I.” Not but what this “I” was a most respectable “I”; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that “I” from the bottom of my heart. But—here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other—the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1928, referring to a novel by “Mr. A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers.”
Do men and women have substantially different writing styles? This question is so loaded that anyone standing within several miles of it is in profound danger of getting blasted to smithereens. It subsumes within it a nexus of thornily interrelated questions, having to do with biological difference, gender-based socialization, literary prejudice, generic apartheid, and the very meaning of style. Which is to say…
Yes. If (as is generally agreed) men and women exhibit certain broad personality differences based on biology, socialization, or some combination of the two, and if (as is somewhat less generally agreed), style reflects personality, then it stands to reason that men and women would tend to write in a noticeably different way. But it’s difficult to get beyond such a broad statement, partly because most commentary on the question has been subjective and impressionistic, and very often invidious (see the above quotations).
However, in recent decades a number of studies have attempted to measure the differences scientifically. All but two of those I’ve been able to track down took the written work of undergraduate college students for their sample. One study had testers evaluate every sentence according to whether it was “very bold,” “bold,” “tentative,” “very tentative,” or “evaluative.” Men had about a third more “bold” sentences than the women and 15 percent more “tentative” sentences; the rest of the categories were about equal. A second study found that males wrote more simple sentences, used more numerals and drew explicit conclusions using logical connectives like therefore, whereas females employed more exclamations, questions, figurative language, color terms and more connectives generally. A third, focusing on “stylistic and discourse features associated with women’s writing,” found that women in the sample used three times as many exclamation points as the men and used expressions such as I think, I guess, and I feel twice as often. In an argumentative essay, half of the women studied “acknowledged the legitimacy of opposing concerns,” whereas only a quarter of the men did. On the other hand, the researchers found no gender effects relating to verbosity, inclusion of nonessential information, numerals, markers of audience acknowledgement, or the kinds of hedges and qualifiers that Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Deborah Tannen, and other linguists have discerned in women’s speaking styles.*
A clear drawback to these studies is the nature of their samples. That is, although undergraduate papers probably do show us something about baseline writing inclinations among men and women, they reveal very little about stylistic differences in the higher or even the middle reaches of literature. Mary Hiatt’s 1978 book The Way Women Write tried to do exactly that. Hiatt made a fairly random selection of 100 current paperbacks equally divided into four categories: nonfiction books by women (from Joyce Brothers’s The Brothers System for Liberated Love and Marriage to Joyce Maynard’s Looking Back), nonfiction books by men (Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, Gary Carey’s Brando! ), novels by women (Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Rona Jaffe’s The Other Woman), and novels by men (Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Irving Wallace’s The Seven Minutes). She took sizable chunks from all, ran them through the computer, and emerged with predictably mixed results. In most of her measures, which ranged from sentence length to amount of simile use, there was no significant difference between the men and women writers. However, men used 50 percent more illustratives ( for example) and illatives (therefore) than women, whereas women used 50 percent more causatives (because, for, since) and substantially more parentheses. Several adverbs showed up multiple times in the men’s work and not at all in the women’s: consequently, exactly, strictly, surely, and wryly. And numerous women but no men used these adverbs: cheerfully, desperately, scarcely. Women showed a particular fondness for the word really, using it twenty-six times compared with nine for the men. One striking finding was related to the rhetorical figure of polysyndeton—using a conjunction such as and or or rather than a comma to separate the elements in a series. Women used it three times as often as men.
A study published in the summer of 2003 took advantage of a larger sample and a quarter-century’s technological advances. Three Israeli computer scientists fed 604 current texts—half written by men, half by women—into a computer. When they crunched the numbers, they emerged with an algorithm that, they claimed, could predict the gender of any text’s author with 80 percent accuracy. The formula is based on word use. Certain words seem to come more frequently to men and women, respectively. The biggest single difference is that women use personal pronouns far more often than men, who in turn are partial to determiners (a, the, that, and these), numbers and quantifiers such as more and some. With, if, and not are heavily female words; around, what, and are are male.
It seems a little kooky, but it seems to work. I know that because a Web site (http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html) allows anyone to type or paste in any text of 500 words or more, indicate whether it is fiction, nonfiction, or a blog entry, and have it instantly analyzed according to the algorithm, including a numerical account of the usage of the key words. Then you’re asked to indicate if the computer was right or wrong, allowing it to keep a running tab of the results. When I last checked, more than 110,000 samples had been submitted, and the correct answer had been given 75.67 percent of the time. I’m not surprised by the 110,000 figure, because this is seriously addictive. I started entering texts that I pulled from the Web at random—the first chapters of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Moby-Dick, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called “Baby Party.” The only one the computer got wrong was the Fitzgerald story, evidently because of the author’s frequent use of the “feminine” words with and and. The exercise became seriously depressing when I started entering things I had written—articles, book chapters, personal essays—and found that every single one of them was tabbed as male.
It’s tempting to throw all these studies, and any generalizations about men’s and women’s writing differences, into a trash heap labelled ARL (for Anachronistic, Reductive, and Limiting), and to say, with Joyce Carol Oates, “the serious artistic voice is one of individual style, and it is sexless.” Tempting, but—in a book about distinctiveness of style—imprudent. Though one can find writers of either gender composing in any conceivable manner, some differences do appear when you look at men’s and women’s writing in the aggregate. The only gender-based difference that consistently shows up in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality testing is that 60 percent of men characteristically employ a “thinking” style rather than a “feeling,” style, whereas 60 percent of women are “feelers.” This divergence seems to carry over into writing. A “female” writing style would tend to stress emotional and personal connections (and connections of all kinds—think of all that polysyndeton); a “male” style hierarchical, logical ones (think of all the therefore’s).
It also appears to be the general case that compared to women, men try harder to be noticed as writers and as a result more often have noticeable prose styles. First-class female writers do have distinctive styles, but often in a subtler, less ostentatious way. William Gass, rather unhelpfully, attributes this disparity to men’s “blood congested genital drive.” A feminist writer, Darsie Bowden, describes the very concept of “voice” as “inherently masculinist…powerful, distinctive and resonant.”
Another way of putting it is that whereas men display, women reveal. Women, in any case, tend to put their cards on the table a bit more reluctantly than men do. Mary Hiatt writes, “The style of the women writers appears conservative, somewhat cautious, and moderate as compared with the style of the men writers…. It is, in general, a middle-of-the-road-style, not given to extremes of length and brevity, not given to extremes of emotion and action.”
Maybe Fay Weldon had it right: women need to get home to the children and other duties, and just don’t have time to diddle around.