Women tend to use more qualifiers in their speech and writing.
“I feel that…”
“…because I think that…”
“…and I really do believe that…”
etc.
In order to understand the difference between how men and women speak and write, you must first understand how each thinks.
THIS guy does!
BTW, you ever see the difference between how a man and woman uses a map while driving?
A man will orient his bearings to North (up or forward on the map) while a woman will turn the whole map around this way and that, orienting the map to keep the direction the car is driving up or forward.
Depending on the culture that’s partly due to schooling. I kept being told I had horrible handwriting, but the worst offense I commmited was having forward-leaning handwriting. When I discovered that the kind of handwriting we got taught was called caligrafía francesa (French style; round letters with vertical bars) and was mostly taught in all-girls’ schools while a different kind called caligrafía inglesa (English style; oblong, forward-tilted letters and forward-tilted bars) was mostly taught in all-boys’ schools I was soooooo mad! Every other “bad handwriting” of either gender in my class was a forward-tilter, the only boy whose hand got frequently praised was a rounder who’d been scolded for it before the two schools merged into a co-ed one… and our post-merger teachers who counted “a pretty hand” as a grading element did so only for girls. So, while there was a greater tendency to round hands among the girls and tilted ones among the boys, there was also a cultural element of what school had you attended, which kind of handwriting had you been taught/expected to have.
And then you run into a case like The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished (by both of us) final novel. I read through two chapters before I realized the (1st person) protagonist was supposed to be a woman. How difficult is it for an author to present a convincing voice of the opposite sex? Is it easier for a woman to write a male voice?
I don’t think so, given that the female authors who can write male characters well seem to be regarded as exceptional and get praised for it. Lois McMaster Bujold being an example I’m familiar with; she’s given credit for being good at writing men, and IMHO her male characters do feel more genuine than most female writers can pull off. IIRC, she’s commented that she’s been told by men “you write like a man” as a compliment.
Er, no, totally wrong. You’re describing the difference between people who have learnt how to use a map properly (who will orient the map to match the direction of travel) and those who never learnt to read upside down. Experienced navigators always orient the map.
This has nothing to do with writing, but it needed to be said.
Isn’t aligning the map and yourself to North known as orienteering?
I thought that alignment to an absolute like North instead of a relative alignment (what you percieve at that moment) is one of the things that differs between male and female negotiate their respective ways through unfamiliar terrain.
There was a thread a while back describing how men and women use different strategies…women use landmarks…men will go like “Go north on Racine ave. for half a mile and then take Poplar Lane west…”
whereas women would instead say something like “Go strait up until you see the Florist, the go left until you see the Methodist Church…”.
So I’ve understood. IIRC, the result is women are generally better at finding their way in regions they have some familiarity with (ie, know the landmarks), while men are better at finding their way in areas they’ve never been. Plus, I recall a study involving mazes where it turned out that women did much better in finding their way when landmarks (like potted plants to one side of an opening) were provided, while with men it made no difference if there were landmarks or not; they didn’t use them when provided. <insert men don’t ask for directions joke>
I suspect there might also be a UK/US divide at play. We don’t (with one or two exceptions) have cities built on grid/block patterns where you can give directions like that. I don’t think I’ve ever come across compass directions used in giving directions, at least within a city. (We might say things like, “Take the M1 northbound” when talking about major cross-country routes, though - that’s the only place where you see destination signs pointing to “The North” etc, but roads are simply not signposted with directions.
I wouldn’t usually turn the map around for driving, but when navigating offroad I always do, so I can relate the contours of the ground to the map more easily.
