Some Fun Widgets · 8:41am Mar 30th, 2013
Vimbert posted a short blog this evening about a widget that uses some research on differences in writing between male and female authors to try to determine an author's gender from a block of text. It's kind of fun to try out, though as the comments on Vimbert's blog reveal, it doesn't seem to be particularly accurate.
As for me, I tested one chapter from each of my stories, and both my Bradel Brainstorming blog posts, and got 3 female results (2 story, 1 blog) and 2 male results (1 story, 1 blog). As I said on Vimbert's blog, I find this generally unsurprising. My enormous lumberjack beard belies the fact that within my breast beats the heart of a romantic schoolfilly. (I also tried it out on a few other peoples' stories for fun, but I'll let you play with it yourselves instead of spoiling the game by telling you more)
A couple other interesting widgets for writing evaluation came up in the comments on Vimbert's post as well. The first claims to analyze word choice and tell you who, among famous authors, shares stylistic similarities with you. This is kind of interesting, but I can't help feeling like it's pretty much pablum. I saw nothing like repeatable results out of this. The second is a Flesch-Kincaid readability / grade level measure. This is pretty standard stuff; even MS Word will give it to you, if memory serves (I've basically given up on using Word at this point).
Neither of the first two widgets said anything particularly interesting about my writing, but the Flesch-Kincaid one was another matter. Basically, what it told me is that my stories and my blog posts are completely different things. Reading ease is on a 1-100 scale, with high scores meaning something is easier to read. Take a look:
"The Amazingly Awesome Adventures of Tank the Tortoise (by R. Dash)":
Grade Level: 6
Reading Ease: 71
"Purple Prose, or A Night at the Clopera":
Grade Level: 5
Reading Ease: 73
"Bell, Book & Candle":
Grade Level: 6
Reading Ease: 68
"Bradel Brainstorming – On Cutie Marks":
Grade Level: 12
Reading Ease: 43
"Bradel Brainstorming – Dream Sequences":
Grade Level: 11
Reading Ease: 47
And this blog post:
Grade Level: 14
Reading Ease: 38
I'm certainly not conscious of trying to write in two different ways here, so I find this result completely fascinating.
Just quickly tried two blog posts of mine, my two published stories and a few unpublished passages. Both blog posts were male, the two stories were female and the passage was male. Interestingly, the POV character is both stories is female while the POV character in the passage was male. So then a tried another passage and the unpublished first chapter of my AU fic. The AU fic was female (POV: Rarity) and the passage was also female (POV: male OC...)
Humm...
Apparently it gives weight to pronouns, so I am now less impressed. Of course I will be using female pronouns a lot of I am writing from a female POV.
958312 That's exactly how my three story selections sorted. "Bell, Book & Candle" came out male, while "Amazingly Awesome Adventures" and "Purple Prose" both went female, and by narrow enough margins that the pronouns were a deciding factor.
...also, now that I write that last sentence, apparently I've really got a thing for alliterative titling.
What do you use instead of Word?
958361 Depends on the context. I've taken to writing stories directly into Google Docs now, so they're easier to pass around to pre-readers – though I'm really not a fan of Google Docs either. But the convenience for Fimfiction writing is huge.
For my own purposes (say, when I'm writing a blog post), I'll usually type it up in WordPad. It has text wrap and basic font formatting, so it's pretty easy to transfer from there to here, and I don't have to waste a lot of time digging through Word options.
If I want to do something professional, like a journal submission or classwork, that'll always go in LaTeX. Everything is better in LaTeX.
...and I suppose, come to think about it, if I need to crank out a quick table, I'm not completely above using Word. But it's a pretty small number of contexts in which I'm willing to give up the beauty of a LaTeX document for a scrap of easier functionality out of Word. If I need to write a couple statistics test questions to give to someone else who's assembling an exam, that'll probably get done in Word. But anything that's going to be seen publicly, I can't bring myself to deliver a product as ugly as what Word provides.
958361 I use GNU Emacs, myself, with org-mode and/or (multi)markdown and/or BBCode. Does everything I need while I'm writing, and exactly nothing I don't.
I know Ghost uses Scrivner. Having looked into it a bit, I'd say Scrivner is definitely worth checking out. (It's not for me, but that's a more complicated issue.)