How men and women blog

Several internet studies have highlighted the importance of differentiating between gender and social context.

One study, by linguists Susan Herring and John Paolillo, looked at how people write blogs. At first, it seemed like there was a significant gender difference in the language of blogs.

But when they looked again, the linguists found that what was really going on was a genre difference: men were more likely to write topic-based blogs and women more likely to write diary-style blogs.

But of course, there were also many people who didn’t pick the genre most typical for their gender.

When the researchers compared within each genre, the original “gender” difference disappeared.

Source: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch