Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

I came across this very interesting article on MSN as part of my daily routine before work and decided to read it after finishing the critical do-or-die weekly project (Ha! jus kiddin!). Anyways, this article was titled “Myth of Online Anonymity” by Robert Vermosi (Editor for MSN Tech & Gadgets).

Besides telling the reader about encrypted routers used for surfing, multiple IP addresses and usage of fake email accounts to remain anonymous, it would still be easy to determine the age, origin, nationality and sex(?this got me?) of the author who wrote it. It got me wondering! It went to describe how men and women thought and wrote differently. While men used words such as “some,” “this”, “as” in informal writing, women used “actually,” “everything,” and “because.” While writing formally, men wrote using words like “what”’, “more” and “around, whereas women would use words like “if” “with” & “where”. Now these are just few words, the extensive table of words used in each style of writing is not known, also the author (Neal Kazwetz) explicitly says this form is only 60% accurate. Also it could vary depending upon age of the writer and medium of communication. Eg: Emails most often tend to lean towards the informal type.

Now isn’t that interesting? To check if this really worked, i looked up the last blog that had more than 300 words and fed it into this tool devised by Dr. Kazwetz to determine the sex of the writer. I found La Louve’s balou blog. And the results were just amazing or should i say funny

Genre: Informal
Female = 1354
Male = 745
Difference = -609; 35.49%
Verdict: FEMALE

Genre: Formal
Female = 672
Male = 758
Difference = 86; 53%
Verdict: Weak MALE
Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Here’s the Kazwetz test which he’s called the ‘Gender Guesser’. We could try this out on the next blogger who joins DSS. Have fun, guessing.

Go to Forensics and scroll down and hit on Gender Guesser to take the test.