Gender-Typical Style in Written Language.

Three lines of inquiry bear on the supposition that women's written language differs from men's in socially significant ways: (1) research on women's speech, (2) analyses of women's belles lettres, and (3) research on women's epistemology. This study was designed to test the supposition that male and female writing styles differ. College students' writing was subjected to a variety of lexical, syntactic, and text-level analyses for features that have been linked to writers' gender in previous research and theory. To determine whether gender differences were more pronounced in spontaneous expressive writing to an intimate audience, relative to revised instrumental writing to a distant audience, compositions representing these polar extremes were elicited. In addition to considering writers' biological gender, the design of the study took into account measured gender role orientation as described in androgyny theory. Overall, the results of this study warrant the view that the writing of men and women is far more similar one to the other than different. Differences due to mode of discourse were more widespread than differences due to gender. Still, where male and female styles did diverge, they differed in predicted directions. For example, women used far more exclamation points than did men. In addition, women were more likely than men to acknowledge the legitimacy of opposing points of view. The findings of this study can inform discussions of instructional proposals regarding gender and writing.

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