PART I : ARTICLE ON CMC & GENDER AND AGE

A corpus-based study of gender and age in blogs

Abstract

Analysis of a corpus of 500 text files of blogs incorporating close to 5000 words that are equally divided between American men and women authors. The analysis also indicates the significant differences in writing style between the two genders as well as their age factor. Such differences are found by examining the blog’s vocabulary in determining age of the authors, both male and female bloggers.

Objective

The objective of the study is to comprehend the vast differences of linguistic styles used between men and women focusing on the age factor in their writing style. The focus of the research is given specifically by looking at the gender-based differences and the age factor in the written discourse (blog). In addition, the study also concentrates on whether linguistic characteristics of speech by male and female bloggers are transferred to their written discourse and how age influences their style of writing.

Keywords

Keywords used in this research are mostly genders, age and some linguistic characteristics as the study focuses more on writing style in the blog and how both are interrelated.

Instruments

This study collects blogs through a manual collection using Globe of blogs which indexes according to the authors' location, gender, age, birthday, name, and topic. Biber grammatical tagger is used to identify a large set of grammatical features. The Biber tagger is a computer program which automatically assigns (tags) parts of speech (POS) of every word in the text and therefore recognizes components of the English Language.

Selection of participant

The corpus used for the study consists of 500 text files of blogs written by American men and women authors and they are divided into four gender and age-based groups. Refer below:

Men		Women
Group 1	Group 2	Group 3	Group 4
31 and over (126 texts )	30 and under (124 texts )	31 and over (130 texts )	30 and under (120 texts)

Data Analysis

Data included normalized frequency counts of relevant linguistic features across gender and age groups. Linguistic features such as pronouns, stance markers, and ego-centric sequences were counted based on their distribution in the texts. The use of personal pronouns (first, second, and third person) and the relationship between the author and the "unseen" readers of the blogs are studied. Frequency counts of determiners (a, the, that, these) and quantifiers (one, two, more, some) are examined. Expression of stance is analyzed from a general perspective by quantifying stance markers through complement clause constructions (e.g., Adjective + that complement clause: "I'm not sure that the project goes in two weeks") and stance adverbs (e.g., possibly, definitely). Analysis of stance markers broadly covers the three semantic distinctions such as epistemic, attitudinal, and style of speaking.

Findings

In the study, several things have been discovered. Firstly, men use more determiners and quantifiers in their blogs than women. This is because, men write more about objects and related informational topics and preferred generic information about human subjects. Women use more hedges and expressions of uncertainty, doubt, or tentativeness by younger women than older men and the two other groups in the study. Younger writers exhibit a tendency to use more involved and conversational features than their older counterparts. Moreover, younger authors use more ego-centric sequences than older authors across categories.In terms of personal pronounce, younger authors tend to use it more often than older authors but there is no there is no differences in terms of gender.

Conclusion

The study confirmed that there are several linguistic differences in the informal writing styles of men and women authors. Hence, same generalizations from spoken discourse, such as face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, and formal written texts of men and women are potentially transferred to the structure of writing in blogs. The age of authors also contributed relevant data in characterizing the writing styles and linguistic preferences of authors in blogs. The interaction between gender and age in some of the features analyzed in this study is noteworthy and requires further studies.

Source

Friginal, E. (2009, July). A corpus-based study of gender and age in blogs. Retrieved March 31, 2012, from Business Library: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7018/is_2_35/ai_n57675452/

PART II :THE INFLUENCE OF AGE AND GENDER

IN WRITING STYLE OF BLOG

Introduction:

There are many researchers that investigate the effect of gender in writing style between man and women. They proposed the idea that man are normally tend to be more explicit, informative and direct while women are more personal, tentative and narrative. A research done by Eric Frigina (n.d) adds that age also influence a person’s writing style. For this paper, entries from selected blogs are used as data. To analyse the data, the framework introduced by Biber and Burges (2001) is used.

Purpose of Study:

The main objective of this study is to link the bridge between age and gender with writing style. This paper also tries to find the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics that influenced a person’s writing style.

Methodology:

The corpus used for the study consists of 8 entries files of blogs written by Malaysian men and women authors. There are four gender and age-based groups in the corpus: (1) men, 25 and over; (2) men, 25 and under; (3) women, 25 and over; and (4) women, 25 and under. Each group consists of two participants which were selected randomly based according to their categories. From each authors, an entry is selected to be analysed.

Description of Corpus:

Basically, for this purpose of research, we used various entries from 8 different blogs as the corpus.

Framework for Analysis:

For the purpose of this study, the framework used by Biber & Burges (2001) is used as a guideline for the analysis. Biber & Burges summarize four major generalizations on the functional differences in the linguistic characteristics of discourse of men and women based on previous research. These generalizations are:

1. Men speak considerably more than women in mixed-gender settings (Crawford 1995);

2. Men tend to be more interested in conveying information while women are generally more focused on the personal/interactional aspects of the conversation (Lakoff 1975; Holmes 1993);

3. Women tend to be more tentative than men in their use of language (Coates 1993, 1998) and in some form of writing tending to use more hedges and "ego-centric sequences" (Rubin & Green 1992); and

4. Women's discourse is lower in the use of persuasive strategies, tending to emphasize narrative strategies more (Rubin & Green 1992; Fleischman 1998).

As the focus of the study is more on oral interaction, there are some differences that can be detected when it comes to written form. The use of emoticons and pictures are among the differences, and it will be used to analyze the data collected in this study. Meanwhile, the first point of the generalization stated by Biber and Burges will not be used in this study as it was meant for oral interaction and cannot be applied in written form.

Finding and Discussion:

1) Informative vs. personal/ interactional.

Based on figure 1, for woman authors, their writing is tend to be more personal rather than informative compared to man authors. Woman authors are more likely to be more personal in their writing because they try to create connection with their readers. They tend to write their personal stories or daily activities as it can make their readers closer to them. For instance, woman authors tend to use first person pronoun more and tell their readers even meticulous details about their life. As in The Life of Saz, “That was my Mama's advice to me back then when I was a teenager. At thirteen, I remember my skin breaking out with pimples on my forehead.” While, the topic chosen by man authors tend to be unrelated to their personal life as in The Procrastinated Blog, where the author write “So, him being so critical, albeit true and accurate, may jeapordize his own steppings in the industry.” It validates Biber and Burges (2001) theory about the linguistics characteristics in the discourse of men and women. He says that men are more interested in transmitting information, while women are more engage in the interactional aspects of the discourse.

2) Direct vs. Tentative

Based on the chart above, findings show that the distribution of percentage is balanced for woman and man above 25 and woman below 25. While for man authors who are below the age of 25 are drawn to use more direct language. The reason behind this is, women are preferably use euphemism to maintain the solidarity that they have with their readers. As the male authors, they become more mature and less aggressive and conveying their thoughts in the form of writing as compared to the younger male bloggers. Male bloggers who are less than 25 years old are more direct due to their believe in the freedom of speech in expressing their ideas and thoughts as written by Syazril Ashraf in his blog, "Self discovery is bullshit. A brief self inquiry in front of the mirror is good enough to tell everything”. He tends to use vulgar language to convey his thoughts and message. As oppose to above examples, this example shows the use of more polite words, “some movies are funny or enjoyable only when you watch it in the cinemas, but when you watch it at home, the magic gone!” This finding is not in line with Biber and Burges (2001) idea which state that only woman tend to use more tentative words in writing.

3) Explicit vs. narrative

The chart above shows the findings on woman and man authors regarding the issues of explicit and narrative styles in writing. As for woman writers, they like to write deliberately on their chosen topic as for them, every little thing must be written precisely and sometimes their writing tend to be more lengthy compared to male authors. Meanwhile, for men they tend to only highlight the main points and try their best to avoid from driven out of the topic. As an example, in the blog Lady of Leisure & her [favourite] things, the blogger write, “I am currently sitting in my living room, listening to the quasi-silence provided by the fact that my mildly rambunctious children are next door playing the Wii with their friends.”, while Nur Hadi Zainol writes, “In life we have to remember that we can't live alone. No man is an island.” This finding supports Biber and Burges (2001) theory in linguistics characteristics that influence writing style.

4) The use of picture and emoticons.

Based on the figure above, the finding shows that woman bloggers are more likely to use more emoticons and put more photos in their blog. In terms of putting more photos, woman bloggers believe that a picture can speak thousand words. Meanwhile, a man wants his reader to believe on his own words rather than being distracted by pictures. When it comes to the use of emoticons, to woman, emoticons is sort of replacing the use of body language, gestures and tone in face-to-face communication. For example, “hey you guys =D how's everyone doing? i'm doing good<33” taken from the blog titled Simplicity.

Conclusion:

Biber and Burges (2001) theories in the function of linguistics characteristics in writing style is determined by the blogger’s age and gender. However, not all of the theories can be applied as our findings show that tentative vs direct is not in line with their findings. Human beings are subjective in nature and researcher cannot categorize an individual based on characteristic of the larger group. There will always be outliers in any research finding. There are many things that influence a person’s writing style beside age and gender.

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