Female writers Vs. Male writers...

Okay, so I'm curious about the general consensus to these queries:

Does the work produced by female authors consistently differ from the work produced by males in a significant way?

And,

In what ways would you, personally, be able to identify a text as written by a female or male?

And also,

In your experience, do female authors write female character more sympathetically than male characters, and vice versa for male authors?

Twitter: @JCGlendenning

The reason I ask, my fellow fictioners*, is that it would tie into my language investigation nicely. Like a glove, some might say. You'd be doing me a huge favour if you took the time to even reply quickly!

I would be even more ecstatically interested if anyone would answer with fantasy specifically in mind, because as a genre is has a stereotype of female authors - yet a vast majority of everything I read in fantasy is by male authors. I don't take the gender of the writer into consideration when reading... until I remember their name as good or bad. I have a good mix of gender in my favourite authors, mind.

Robin Hobb,
Naomi Novik
Tolkien,
Jim Butcher,
Trudi Canavan,
Diana Wynne Jones (more so in the past than now)
Garth Nix...

And looking at this list... I see that female authors of fantasy are more numerous than I remembered. Either way, I still need to know other opinions on the matter!

Gender in writers doesn't bother me, unless something occurs which brings their gender into light... like spouting crap and throwing in our faces when really, all we're trying to do is escape this blessed place for a few hours.

Reply either on here, or through Twitter @JCGlendenning

Thanks!

*fictioners: collective noun for readers and writers of fiction.

Language investigation part two...

Okay, so I had my first lesson of English Language after the summer break today. Spoke to my teacher about my question and hypothesis and received some feedback on my ideas.

Basically... I have to be extremely careful that I don't tread into Literature territory, and because I'm using fiction as the basis for my investigation that's going to be a major pitfall I have to guard against.

Other than that... I guess that I am on the right track at least. I wanted to focus on the characters, and the way they are described by the authors, the language used to show their actions, the way they are active or passive in sentence construction, if they perform stereotypical roles or not...

And, by Jove, I never thought I'd ever want to do a study on gender issues. Damn.

Oh well. Roll with it.

Language investigation...

Hey guys, or gals, how are things?

I'm currently writing for my English Language investigation coursework. I've found a "hypothesis" to go with, it's really a question, and I'm enjoying it... but I have no idea if my teacher's going to like it at all. Ah well.

So, the reason I'm blogging is to tell you all that I will think about posting up the finished thing once I've gotten it finalised - in small amounts, it's a monster!

I'll tell you the gist of it now.

WARNING: Subject to frequent, swift and unannounced changes!

“How do the ways female authors of fantasy use language in their first chapter differ from the ways male authors of fantasy use language in their first chapter?”

Oh, and yeah... I realise that it's a general statement of vagueness... but that's kind of what you're supposed to have.

I'll be analysing lexis, semantics, pragmatics and possibly grammar. I've started on the semantics/grammar/structure side of things.

No idea when it's going to be finished, but hey, it's for college, and they love deadlines!