Hi everyone! Today's post is a really nice interesting one, as a couple of weeks ago I was contacted by Nick from Grammarly. Grammarly are an online grammar checker, and I'll link them here for those of you who don't know what they do! They recently conducted a survey on who writes better- men or women? I'll input exactly what Nick said to me in his email below so you can see what this is all about.
"The poll was conducted through Google Consumer Surveys. About 3,000 people completed our survey online, and about 54% of them were men. While we know it's not perfect, we're hoping the results provide a good starting point. If the information resonates well with readers, we'll be doing more thorough studies on similar subjects in the future."
Now, as a feminist and an advocate of equal opportunities I was incredibly excited to see just what this poll had uncovered. For years, female authors have used initials or male names to allow their book to be seen as more marketable. Even the literary giant J K Rowling is named as such because publishers told her that her name- Joanne, would put some people off buying her book. With this in mind, I checked out their info graphic.
The info graphic starts, as you can see- with the statement that 59% of the surveyed readers believe that women are better writers. This is very interesting, as even if every female surveyed stated that they felt that women wrote better, which would result in a 46% total- this still means that a significant proportion of the men surveyed believe that women are the superior gender when it comes to writing. This surprised me slightly as literature is still in many ways dominated by men, despite the rise of female authors- particularly in the YA genre, with the likes of Suzanne Collins, Veronica Roth and Cassandra Clare all producing multi-million dollar franchises from their books.
Equally, the fact that so many believe that women spend longer developing plot and writing long sentences- features which could be seen as 'rambling' is particularly interesting to me as a feminist as the patriarchal view in society that woman 'talk too much and often find it hard to get to the point' is in many ways reflected in this statistic. However, in writing these attributes are not only acceptable, but encouraged- and this may go some way to explaining the result of the statistic.
I do believe that at the end of the day, it comes down to the individual author. I have met and read some incredible pieces by both female and male authors, as well as some truly horrendous bits of literature. I really hope you enjoyed reading this, and found it as interesting as I did- and please remember to check out Grammarly too! Have a lovely day!
*As a special note, for any bloggers who would like to do a post on this info graphic- get in touch with me at rachel.smith1411@googlemail.com and I'll try to help you out! Thanks again to Grammarly for the opportunity and for doing the legwork with the infographic!*
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