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Is it me? Or is it Memorex? T-Rex? 6/12/2010 6:15:47 PM
Blog about Gender Genie I found a new thread on the Kindleboards author forum this morning and thought it would be fun. I checked out several parts of my latest novel up for editing in the Red Cross of Gold Series for gender identification. The Genie supposedly analyses blocks of text and identifies the gender of the author. After putting five different blocks of text from "The Company of Women" (strangely this title seems to match this idea), I learned that I am neither male nor female, but both. When I write dialog with a female character in it, invariably, the Genie says a woman wrote it. I figure this is because the female POV dominates the conversation as the women of old were wont to do. I would never say that of modern women for fear of being tarred and feathered. However, when I put in blocks of text from dialog between males, the author was said to be male. From battle scenes, male. This made me feel a little better.
But I started thinking about this as I read the posts from the other authors on the forum. It seems that we are all just about 50/50 male/female in our writing.
This brings up an interesting point. Authors, good authors, want the feminine characters to retain their femininity and they want their battle scenes to be Mars-like (I won't say 'male' because of the above mentioned tar and feathers). I thought that this Genie thing might be a good tool for judging whether we had caught the correct POV for our scenes, be they love scenes or otherwise.
An interesting concept and one that I shall surely make use of in the future.
I have just ordered the proof copy of the 13th book "Children of the Temple" which is available on kindle at the moment.
