On Wed, 14 May 2008 16:32:57 +0100, Jennie Kermode wrote:
> On 2008-05-14, whisky-dave <whisky-dave@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Did they happen to split this media in to male and female writers ?
>
> Writers don't often get to choose what they cover where the big
> stories are concerned. If more women write lightweight articles then
> it's due to editorial prejudices. Which is still interesting, but a
> slightly different issue.
nnnnnn..... Not sure if that's aall of the case. At least in the US,
even for articles of the same merit or in the same publication and
therefore subject to the same editorial prejudices, there's a kind of
mood and style that either has been enforced on writers across something
as broad as "the US publi****ng industry" (which seems unlikely) or is
part of the cultural development of people who write that makes gender
differences apparent. One of the hallmarks of this is that writing of
exemplification by third party anecdote is nearly exclusively a female
trait. For example, if an article about stock trading appears and talks
about how a hypothetical John, Bill, and Mary set up their trading
accounts, it's nearly always from a female writer, while a male writer
will equally reliably only discuss the subject with abstraction out to
specific methods of Foo accounts, Bar funds, and Baz brokerages. I used
to pass long car trips with my family doing this with articles from
various magazines, picking out the genders of the authors fairly well,
even to the point of being able to spot collaborative works as such,
with far better than random accuracy.
--
People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe are
pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door, screaming,
'Take me, take me!'
-- Carl Jacobs in the Monastery
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