DarrenBarefoot.com

Here’s another take on it: perhaps more women who blog (and by that, I mean have personal blogs) have jobs where grammar, punctuation and capitalization are key performance indicators. In response or rebellion, the blog gets used as a place to “let it all hang out” and be lazy about punctuation and grammar. That’s how it is for me, at least. I write properly for my job and when I’m writing my grandma a letter. When I blog, I give myself the freedom to break the rules.

Another possibility — perhaps women who blog tend to do so in a more emotional mindset, where just getting the words onto “paper” is the key activity. Being correct isn’t as important as expressing emotions, and obsessive editing gets in the way of that.

It’s a very interesting observation you’ve made, Darren.

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To me, using all caps is the equivelant of shouting and I hate it when people use all caps since I intuit it rude (no need to shout). This makes life difficult as I spend sometime reading and corresponding with latin americans, who ALWAYS TYPE EVERYTHING IN CAPS. I’m invariably ticked off and have to remind myself of differing cultural norms.

My favourite way to add emphasis to a word is to put it in stars.

Ie.. He said *what*?

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I think this stems from the way girls learn to write in late elementary and junior high. Heart over the I, smiley in the O, cat’s tail in the y, lots of underlining, too many exclamation points, superfluous caps, doodles in the margins, curvy printing and so on. Email, blogs, text and IM provide fewer “emotigraphs”, so to speak. Most women came to the Internet for the communication tools, not the technology. So they ported their communication style. In comparison, men came up through industrial and government R&D, so they were handed Usenet style. Men also tend to be less expressive and more utilitarian in their writing.

However, I haven’t noticed that lack of capitalization in blogs is unique to men.

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That’s an interesting observation. At first I rolled my eyes and sputtered a “whatever” until I remembered my latest blog entry: http://www.fivedamncats.com/blog/05may31.html … and indeed, I was emotional at the time. But moreso, I felt it was needed to get my point across (it’s so easy to skim over all that bland same-sized text haha). I don’t spend my caps freely however.

What’s wrong with gender differences, or differences in general? My blog counts on it.

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I think it’s a matter of voice. At least to my inner-ear, there is a difference between ‘all over the place’ and ‘all OVER the place’ … both of which would be different than “ALL OVER THE PLACE”. Can I lucidly define these differences? Only personally: to me, the first two differ by degrees of emphasis. The third is heavy handed, and so would need to either be a punchline or a thesis point or avoided.

I just went and looked at my own blog, and I variously use caps, bold, and, interestingly, the old-school *bold-by-way-of-asterik* for emphasis. In my writing, at least, it’s not a matter of having not been online for very long; this is why the asterik and _underscore_ slip in still.

I don’t use italics very often. They’re more wry than I can legitimately pull off. I’m subtle like a sledgehammer.

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Dean & Darren ~ Your theory of the emotional female voice is interesting, but I’m not sure it’s universally supportable.

I would tend to agree with Darren’s observation that female bloggers often use a non-traditional style - and that it’s not just the “personal” and “mommy” blogs, but also the political and issue-based blogs. I will leave the discussion of newsy blogs behind, because I don’t know any female “look-what-I-just-found” blogs.

Although political bloggers (male and female) get emotional, the thrust of their arguments tend towards the logical. Or the rhetorical. Emotional rhetoric is of the essence for both men & women (evildoer, axis of evil, winds of change, waves of freedom) - in most spin or discussion there’s not much actual logical content in play. Logic only works if you agree on first premises, and first premises are almost always emotive or intuited or simply a matter of faith. So, unless you’re discussing known physics, or known mathmatics, or are only “preaching to the choir”, you’re going to have to make a foundation for your first premise.

I would suggest that there’s a *cultural* difference between the male and female blogs which equates to a matter of voice. Form and content are not identical: logical content can be similar but cultural form is a matter of playing to your audience. As a female blogger, (and given anecdotal stories somewhat supported by blog rolls), I tend to assume that the majority of my audience is female. If I’m doing anything besides spitting into the wind, it’s attempting to get other people motivated to think differently. If I’m not using a recognizable voice, (which may be Dooce’s influence upon us all: an interesting idea), I’m a little less entertaining while doing so.

Looking at this mini-essay, actually, you’ll note that I starred *cultural*. Therein is my anti-thesis to your thesis. Is it emotional? Not particularly. (This is a very old discussion, in a very low key format.) If I were being funny, which I’m not, I might say CULTURAL. Context is key.

It makes me wonder if there’s a misperception that the masculine rhetorical voice is logical?

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I don’t think it’s a question of “more emotional” for women, I think it’s a question of “more rules” for men. Style often breaks/bends the rules, but it’s also usually more communicative.

Personal blogs or otherwise, sometimes the strict adherence to various rules is a detriment to communicating, not the other way around. If you want a generalization, men get more wrapped up in the rules more often and fail to see the forest through the trees.

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As a female blogger, and my God, a “Mommy Blogger” at that, I do find myself using caps at times.

When I look back over my entries I can see that I began using caps the more confident I became in expressing myself. Yes, my grammar can be atrocious, but when I’m writing, the caps signify what my hands and my eyes would be doing if I were to tell you the story face to face. All my writing is this way.
For instance:
“Okay, you aren’t going to believe this. I saw a MAN breastfeeding this morning - little plastic hose and all! TELL ME YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE!”

You get it? Emotional, yes. Grammar deficient – oh, most definitively.
Basically, I believe I may be an all caps kind-of talker. However, is it my femaleness that makes me want to use the caps to replace my hand gestures? Perhaps.
However, I don’t believe it’s that women are more emotional writers than men. I believe we may just be more willing to write our emotion visually.

Oh, and Arwen: http://www.cyrenity.com/blog.html

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To start, I just want to say this:
http://joie.typepad.com/joie/2005/02/you_are_a_gramm.html
pretty much is proof I have the ability to use good grammar. But, I see my blog as a CONVERSATION through an alternate means of communication, not a formal written work. Therefore, it is important for me to show inflection and various shades of emphasis. If you were in my living room, I’d be using my hands. Without my hands, I have all caps and other creative uses of characters available to me on the keyboard. I don’t know whether the fact I am a woman makes any difference or not.

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MAYBE WE READ EACH OTHER’S BLOGS AND FIND THAT PEOPLE LIKE YOU PISS US OFF ALOT CAUSE YOU’RE SELF IMPORTANT BOOBS WITH NO SENSE OF FUN OR STORY TELLING SO WE HAVE TO YELL ABOUT IT FOR EFFECT GET IT?

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