Dear Slashers,

[stranj100]

I'm sorry, but this has been building for sometime and I have to get this off my chest.

When you are writing, please be aware of gender tone. I know something like 80-90% of slashers are female, but that is no excuse to write a guy like a bad facsimile of a female.  Men are doers not talkers. A recent study has shown men talk about 40-60% less then

Comments

[damos]

Hiya Stranj,

As a communication guy, I wanted to pop in and say that 99% of research (not that much of an exaggeration) shows that men actually do talk as much (if not more than) women. It is simply that men think that women talk more.

Most popular culture references about it repeat an urban myth that men say about 7000 words a day and women say about 20,000. That is not substantiated by any study (it was just made up). The most recent study (released last week) showed very slight difference (about 1% less for men than women--not statistically significant given the number of words per day).

Which isn't to say that each person is different. While your average person says somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,000 words per day, the outliers in studies usually runs the gamut from 1,000 to 40,000 words per day. So some people barely speak while others speak a lot. But that is individual and not particularly predicted by sex/gender.

Now, that doesn't address how men express emotions, of course, but it does show that perception and reality can be two very different things.

I agree with you that every writer (male or female, honestly) ought to think very carefully about how they portray any character--and I think that overly wordy characterizations (from Claremont's X-men right on down to fanfic) can be trouble--but then I have always been a proponent of the "show don't tell" school of writing.

[stranj100]

I was referring to an article I read a month or two back. There are probably qualifiers involved. I hadn't read the actual study. You know how news agencies like to generalize. It just goes to show, you find six studies saying one thing you'll find half a dozen refuting it.

[damos]

It just goes to show, you find six studies saying one thing you'll find half a dozen refuting it.
True, but in this case, it is something on the order of 63 or so studies showing men talking as much or more than women and 1 or 2 showing that men talk slightly less.

At any rate, individual differences are much more a predictor of talking habits than sex or gender (and a hurricane is just arriving at my house) so I'll stop there.