Blogalysing the Blogalyser

[frameofmind6]

Okay, I'm so fascinated by this one that I just had to do a little experimenting with it to try to figure out how it works. I "blogalyzed" several of my friends' xangas (these are friends from high school that I used to stay in touch with through xanga, though most have drifted away by now -- I didn't blogalyze anybody from around here), specifically looking for people with distinctive (and distinctively different) writing styles and habits. I'll put the results and my accompanying analysis under a cut, so all you non-crazy people don't have to read it if you don't want to... (*grin*)

 

Alright, this one is for my friend CJ. In general, her journal entries usually revolve around her life, anecdotes about friends, recitals, surprise birthday parties and so forth, usually accompanied by witty and soul-searching self-analysis, and almost invariably including some reference to and/or philosophizing about God, religion, or spirituality. Here's her score:

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 12.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 25 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 51% male and 49% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the future and lastly the past.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

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This next one is my sister's (we'll call her ME for convenience sake). Her entries are infrequent, there aren't many of them total, and they're usually rather short. They're usually reflective in nature, sometimes bordering on the spontaneously poetic (by which I mean that they have a certain poeticism about them, but in an unrefined, off-the-top-of-her-head sort of way), sort of glimpses of her insights into herself and what she wants in life -- and occasionally just random thoughts and brief anecdotes from daily life.

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 8.

This suggests that your writing style is simplistic
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 16 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 53% male and 47% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's one from another high school friend -- we'll call her J for short. Her journal is very introspective, and often so much so that it's impossible to tell exactly what she's talking about unless you already know. You sorta have to make educated guesses as to what she might be alluding to. I think a majority of her entries are just poetry, usually written by her, and presumably relating to whatever interpersonal crisis is taking place in her life at the moment.

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 15.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 11 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by complexity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 39% male and 61% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the future and lastly the past.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yet another high school friend, who we shall call M. Her blog is a mixture of witty and insightful observations, self-analysis, thoughts on the world and her relationships with friends and significant others, as well as occasional poetry (often her own) and song lyrics.

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 15.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 14 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by complexity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 49% male and 51% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's from another friend, this one actually a guy -- we'll call him C. I honestly don't remember that much about his blog, because I haven't read it in years, but I seem to recall his entries being pretty short and infrequent, usually having to do with D&D and things of that nature, occasionally complaints or anecdotes about recent happenings, and maybe an introspective thought or two.


The Blogalyser reveals...Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 11.This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 7 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by clarity
(writing for the web should be concise).
CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 50% male and 50% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the future and lastly the past.

Find out what your blogging style is like! 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, now for the analysis:

Let's start with the first section. Practically all of the people I tested (I did a few others as well, but these are the ones that had the most interesting and revealing results) scored a "conventional" in terms of writing style -- the only one who did not was my sister, who scored a "simplistic." This seems to be due to the fact that she scored below 10 in the "readability" category -- everyone else scored somewhere between 10 and 20. As far as I know, it is not possible to score above a 20 (which makes sense -- I mean, if that's the ideal range, then 20 would have to be the absolute ceiling. How could something be too readable?).

The three results I have come across for the next piece are "clarity," "complexity," and "verbosity." This is just a rough estimate, but looking at the spread of results I have so far, I would guess that an average of less than 10 sentances per entry earns you a score of "clarity," between 10 and 15 earns you a score of "complexity," and more than 15 earns you a score of "verbosity." There may be others, but these are the only ones I've found so far -- and based on my own scores, I know that "verbosity" extends at least as far as 36 sentences per entry.

The spectra concerning self vs. world and past vs. future seem pretty straightforward. There is some variation, but in general most people I've tested talk primarily about themselves and the present -- which makes sense, considering that these are all personal blogs (as opposed to news blogs and so forth). The people who have larger "world" scores are the ones I would expect to have them -- people who occasionally discuss politics or pursue philosophical topics concerning the world at large. Likewise, those who have larger "social circle" scores make sense that way -- they're people who have a lot of close friends, and are very involved with them, discussing them often in posts.

The really interesting thing to me is the "male/female" spectrum -- I really wish that "Gender Genie" link actually worked, because I would love some more insight into the workings of this measurement. Based on my tests, despite the fact that most of the people I tested were in fact female, only two actually registered as more than 50% "female" -- and one of those, only by 1%.

My hypothesis (unfortunately) is that the kinds of things that this test registers as "female" in nature are the poetic, sometimes cryptic, heavily emotional and interpersonal elements that characterize J's blog entries. She was one of the ones I specifically sought out, suspecting that she would register high on the "female" meter -- and sure enough, she did (there was an even better one, but unfortunately I couldn't get hers to register because there were too many protected entries. Alas. I would have loved to have seen that score...). M, the only other one who registered as "female," exhibits some of those same qualities in her writing -- not as often as J, but definitely more often than some.

So am I to take this to mean that to be female is to be cryptic and sappy, and to write about things in a more detatched, rational, and intellectual fashion is to be male? If so, tsk-tsk, Blogalyser. Come join us in the 21st century... (*grin*)

Comments

[knittingknots.livejournal.com]

The writer is still a style snob. Length of post has nothing to do with clarity.

I suspect the readability is based on some variation of the FOG index, which looks at sentence complexity, length of sentence, and passive voice usage. If it is, then a 10 should reflect a tenth grade reading level...and a 20 something that the esoteric person writing for a technical journal in a post graduate field might put out. (and let me tell you, the most obscure, hard to decipher stuff I ever read was written by an English prof I know...

I had no trouble getting to the gender genie sight. Told me chapter 6 of ATE, where InuYasha proposes to Kagome reads like a man wrote it, which rather surprised me considering the amount of fluff in that chapter, the wedding night chapter was written by a woman, but the last chapter was clearly written by a man.

I went crazy and put my entire working file for the story in and I came out as slightly female, but just barely.

Kind of interesting, but I suspect their algorithm is flawed...

[frameofmind6.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wasn't crazy about the style markings either -- that's part of the reason I wanted to psych out the reasoning behing it (*grin*). Seems like their arguement was based mainly on the opinion that writing for the web should be short (because people have short attention spans, I guess...?), and the accompanying assumption that short writing gets right to the point. I wonder what it would do with a blog full of very short, wordy nonsense -- intelligent, correctly-spelled words in correct sentences, but that make no actual sense overall. Random phrases like, "Dogs are existential," and "The ubiquitousness of vanilla pudding reminds me of summertime and multi-million-dollar lawsuits." Might have to find a way to test that...

If the readability is based on a FOG index, it's possible that there are scores above 20 -- my assumption that there weren't was just based on the fact that (as far as I could tell) they were saying that the higher your number, the better your readability, with 10-20 being the ideal range. I've heard of the FOG index, but I don't know much about it, so I might have to look into that too... (*grin*)

As for the gender thing, yeah, I think they're just completely out of whack. Their definition for female writing must be extremely specialized -- like writing a lot about home or cooking or flowers, or whatever all those women's magazines from the fifties were filled with (*grin*). Now that the site's working again (I kept getting an "under construction" page last night), I gotta go investigate that one further...

Wow, looks like I'm gonna waste a lot of time on this today (*grin*). Ah well -- classes start next week, so I gotta enjoy my freedom while I can...