Another, different voice

You may remember a while ago that I posted a piece, Messes, Clones and Plots like a W, about why I think it's so important to understand technical things about how writing works, to work hard on how you understand them and how you put them into practice, but not to allow them to become rules to be 'kept' or 'broken'. In writing there are no rules, except possibly the one about starting at the top left-hand corner of the page, but only different ways to write different things, some of which work better than others. To refuse the concept of rules doesn't mean abandoning all judgement or discussion of good and bad writing, just making it much more nuanced, and so much more useful.

When she's not writing novels about politics (More Than Love Letters) and campuses (Hearts and Minds), with a warm heart and a satirical pen, Rosy Thornton is a law lecturer. She posted this in the private members' section of WriteWords, and I think it's the most interesting thing I've read in ages about the whole thorny question of 'the rules', and why they seem so alien to some, and so comfortable to others. You have to start by understanding something that she posted later in the discussion:

The anti-essentialist argument [that not all women - or men - are the same] is a very handy one for ignoring the female perspective (or the black perspective or any other perspective outside the domiannt discourse). Well, the point is not that all men think like x or all women think like y. But that - statistically and observably and demonstrably, according to psychologists and anthropologists and others who have studied it - women as a group think differently from men."

Having cleared that up, here's Rosy's piece:

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"If I were blogging, I would head it: ARE THE CW RULES GENDERED?

Time and again I find myself balking at the CW ‘rules’ – both the individual rules themselves and also, possibly, the very notion of there being any rules. But I haven’t ever really thought about why that might be. But here’s a possible theory. It begins with a diversion, so please bear with me.

In the rest of my life I spend a lot of time dealing with rules, because I teach Law, and Law is essentially a set of rules. I also teach Women and Law, in which students are encouraged to challenge the rules from a gender perspective: both the content of the specific rules, which have historically operated to the disadvantage of women in many respects, and the very idea of the rules themselves, in the way they are currently conceptualised. The common law works from the premise that situations (real life, complex, messy situations) can be distilled down into simple, sharp-edged paradigms, from which lawyers can reason and according to which future cases can be decided, and rules can evolve. Feminists have rejected this mode of reasoning – epitomised by legal rules but found throughout the social sciences – as ‘male’.

American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote a book in the 1980s called In a Different Voice. Her thesis is that the two genders think in wholly different ways – something I have to say that rings true with all my own lived experience. Gilligan interviewed children in the schoolyard. She asked them all the question, ‘Would it be justified to steal bread if your children were starving?’ Of the boys, some said yes and some said no. But the majority of the girls said neither. Instead, they worked their way round the question. They said, ‘Surely there must be another way’ and ‘what if you were to explain to the baker about the starving children…?’ In other words they refused to accept such a simplified, black-and-white scenario as being true to life – the exact kind of scenario which is the daily tool of legal reasoning and the basis of all legal rules. Rather, they viewed things as contingent, as muddy, as nuanced, as negotiable.

So, if women think and reason differently from men, do they also speak and write differently? Do they have, quite literally, ‘a different voice’? And if so, what impact does that have on how women write – or how anyone writes if they are trying to get inside a female character and to explore the female experience?

This brings me to the point: the so-called CW rules. Let’s think about some of them. We are told, for example, that modal constructions are to be avoided. Don’t say ‘she could see the mountains, say ‘she saw the mountains. It is stronger writing, we are told – more direct, more pacy, more powerful – ‘better’ writing. Similarly we are told, don’t use lots of subordinate clauses, especially those beginning with a present participle – ‘ing’ clauses are weak and therefore bad. Stick as often as possible to the finite verb. Not ‘gazing out of the window, she saw the mountains’ but ‘she gazed from the window; she saw the mountains.’ But what if rather than strength and directness what you want to achieve is something softer – dare I say, more ‘feminine’? Maybe if I’m writing in a female voice (female character, and first person or close-in third) then my writing patterns should mirror the way a women thinks, the way she experiences the world – which is often (in my experience) packed full of contingency and uncertainty and tentativity and conditionality.

More fundamentally, what about the ‘rule’ that says we should pare down, write sparely, make sure that every word is necessary, every word is doing a job. Why? Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men. Surely ‘not wasting words’ is a very male ideal? I know that I talk nineteen to the dozen for large parts of the day. I know, for example, that when teaching, sometimes if I say the same thing three times over in different ways, it gives people more chance to grasp what I mean. Effective communication can be effusive, it can be sprawling, it can be full of doubt and wondering and even contradiction, and out of the morass emerges understanding - and perhaps it might even be a more nuanced understanding, a warmer and more humane one, than the one which emerges from a fewer, and superficially clearer, set of words.

That’s what I reckon, anyway. Basically: we women are wafflers, so waffling reflects our lives and our voice.

Er, that was it, really."
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Comments

[Phillipa Ashley]

Thank you, thank you, Rosy. I used to read so much about 'Rules' like those you cite that (more times that I care to admit) I've felt unable to write for a while afterwards.

This happened particularly in my early days as a writer - but even now it happens on occasions - I've felt that I *must* be doing something wrong and searched my work, horrified at all the 'sins' I've committed.

I love the idea that women should be allowed to waffle. I suppose it's me loking for 'permission' - is that a female thing too?

I'm not sure that waffling is a feminist issue but I do think that new writers - even of the most commercially oriented genre fiction - should fight tooth and nail to keep their own voices.

[Kate Long]

Rosy, that's a really interesting, cogently-argued take on the subject, and not one I'd considered before.

Phillipa, your last sentence sums up exactly why I argue against the dissemination of inflexible stylistic rules. Brilliant.

[Laura Vivanco]

"Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men."

No, it doesn't:

"About a year ago, Louann Brizendine, founder and director of the University of California, San Francisco's Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic, published The Female Brain. One of the most cited gems within its pages was a claim that women are chatterboxes, speaking an average of 20,000 words per day, nearly three times the mere 7,000 spoken by men.

Seemed to make sense, given the rep of women as purveyors of gossip, not to mention creatures incapable of keeping their traps shut. Right? Wrong.

A new study published today in Science reports men and woman actually use roughly the same number of words daily." (Swaminathan, Scientific American, 2007 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=women-talk-more-than-men&modsrc=latest_news )

"statistically and observably and demonstrably, according to psychologists and anthropologists and others who have studied it - women as a group think differently from men"

But there are vast overlaps between the two groups. Janet Shibley-Hyde has advanced the "gender similarities hypothesis":

"The differences model, which argues that males and females are vastly different psychologically, dominates the popular media. Here, the author advances a very different view, the gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. Results from a review of 46 metaanalyses support the gender similarities hypothesis. Gender differences can vary substantially in magnitude at different ages and depend on the context in which measurement occurs. Overinflated claims of gender differences carry substantial costs in areas such as the workplace and relationships." http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/amp606581.pdf

However, I do agree with Rosy that the "Rules" she mentions are restrictive and there may be very good reasons why an author would want to write something in a way that the Rules would consider "wrong."

Catherine Sheldrick Ross and Mary K. Chelton, in their article "Reader’s Advisory: Matching Mood and Material." Library Journal (February 1, 2001): 52-55. write that:

"When readers reject a book as 'poorly written,' they often mean that the book was successfully written to achieve an effect that they personally dislike - too sexually arousing, too scary, too sentimental, too full of verbal effects, too descriptive, or too literary for them. A fan of the stripped-down Hemingway style might dislike the sensuous language of romance and declare that all romances are 'poorly written'." (53)

They were writing about their research on readers and how readers choose and evaluate books, but I think it's also true of any set of rules about what's "well written" and what's "poorly written." And as I wrote just recently http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/2008/04/case-study-on-genre-rosina-lippis-tied.html , I suspect that different genres and sub-genres tend towards different styles of writing, in order to create the effects that best match the subject matter, tone etc of those genres.

[Sam]

Rosy

'Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men.'

This had me heading back to some extracts I’d read in the 'Guardian' of Deborah Cameron’s book 'The Myth of Mars and Venus'. In one, Cameron provides evidence against the idea that women talk more than men. But, firstly, Cameron says:

'In 2006, for instance, a popular science book called in 'The Female Brain' that claimed that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average utter only 7,000. […] the author of 'The Female Brain' conceded that her claim was not supported by evidence and said it would be deleted from future editions. But the damage was already done: the much-publicised soundbite that women talk three times as much as men will linger in people's memories and get recycled in their conversations, whereas the little-publicised retraction will make no such impression. This is how myths acquire the status of facts.'

Then, Cameron provides some tables, statistics and studies, and concludes that:

'while the results have been mixed, the commonest finding is that men talk more than women.'

Cameron goes on to say that:

'The basic trend, especially in formal and public contexts, is for higher-status speakers to talk more than lower-status ones. The gender pattern is explained by the observation that in most contexts where status is relevant, men are more likely than women to occupy high-status positions; if all other things are equal, gender itself is a hierarchical system in which men are regarded as having higher status.'

I could quote the whole extract, as well as the other two in the 'Guardian'. It’s a fantastically readable and interesting piece of work. I’ve provided a link to the extract if anyone’s interested.

So why does the ‘folk-belief’ that women talk more than men persist?

'[P]eople overestimate how much women talk because they think that, ideally, women would not talk at all.'

I laughed at that. Shame on me.

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/relationships/story/0,,2180812,00.html

[Emma Darwin]

Sam Deborah Tannen makes the point in an earlier book (sorry, can't remember which one) that people's perception of how genders share the total number of words is skewed too: a party where they actually talked 50/50 is perceived as women dominating, a party which is perceived as 50/50 is about 70 men talking. Presumably this is related to the status thing.

"the book was successfully written to achieve an effect that they personally dislike"

Laura, I think this is fascinating. I think we've all met books that rubbed us up the wrong way, subjectively speaking. What's unfortunate is if we confuse that with it being badly written in the objective sense, which is a whole different question.

Stripped-down can be wonderful or deeply dreary. Baroquely elaborate can be extraordinary or ludicrous. Relaxed and readable can be life-enhancing or simply dull. Strange and original can be absolutely thrilling, or tiresomely pretentious. But which we read it as depends on our taste as well as its merits.

[Rachael King]

Sam's quote: '[P]eople overestimate how much women talk because they think that, ideally, women would not talk at all.'

Made me think about a conversation I had once with a man who said "why are there so many female bass players in bands?" (I have been one myself)

I got so mad at him! I was pregnant at the time and that seeemed to arouse my passions. The truth is that there are so few female musicians who play in bands, that a slightly higher incidence of bass players than say, rhythm guitarists or drummers, leads [some] people to think that there are "so many female bass players". I challenged him to name ten female bassists and he couldn't. In reality, the question he should have asked was "why are there so few female musicians?" Because let's face it, most women who play music in bands are singers, some who also play guitar.

Sorry, off topic I know.

My first reaction to Rosie's statement about women waffling, so their writing should be allowed to waffle, is that I always want to yell at people who waffle: "Get to the point of the story!"

[Rosy Thornton]

Interesting, Laura, that many are disputing Brizendine's claim (that women speak more than men). I must admit that I haven't read her book, only seen her finding cited elsewhere. I saw that she was a leading neuropsychiatrist at UCSF, and assumed the finding was a reliable one. Now off to chase up all the references and decide for myself...!

Emma: Many thanks for airing my small rant.

[Laura Vivanco]

The Guardian's Stephen Moss got in touch with Brizendine in 2006 and:

'she tells me that she has accepted the criticism of the numbers quoted in the book - on both volume of words and rate of speech - and will be deleting them from future editions. Nor will they appear in the UK edition, to be published by Bantam in April. "I understand Mark Liberman's point and I am grateful to him," she says. "He felt I was passing on data that was not nailed down, and thus perpetuating a myth, so it will be taken out in future editions." She admits language is not her specialism, and she had been reliant on the advice of others.'

The Guardian also carried out their own experiment, taping the conversations of two staff members, one male and one female. More details here: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/relationships/story/0,,1958118,00.html

I've been getting most of my links from a blog called "Read for Pleasure," and the blogger there also looked into other pseudo-science ideas about the differences between men and women and how they might affect their reading: http://www.readforpleasure.com/2007/09/why-women-read-more-than-men-or-not.html

As I said, though, I don't think any of this invalidates Rosy's challenge to "the Rules." In fact, if one stops thinking of men and women as belonging to two very different, but internally homogeneous groups, and instead thinks of men and women as individuals who each have their own unique set of abilities, preferences, experiences etc (though with the caveat that certain groups of individuals will share similar experiences, similar physical characteristics, etc.), then it's perhaps even more plausible to assume that authors should each have an individual writing "voice."

In addition, as the Guardian article points out, how much one speaks, and the kind of language one uses, is dependent on context, just as there are a range of different effects that a writer can create, using different types/styles of writing, so I wouldn't expect everything even one author produces to sound exactly the same at all times.

[Emma Darwin]

Rosy, you're welcome...

Interesting to see the result of the Guardian's own experiment, though I think journalists, like writers, can't be very typical when it comes to words.

"I wouldn't expect everything even one author produces to sound exactly the same at all times."

I should hope not. Some of my most cherished reviews of The Mathematics of Love have praised what the Washington Post called its 'bilingual dexterity'.;-)

[Rosy Thornton]

"if one stops thinking of men and women as belonging to two very different, but internally homogeneous groups, and instead thinks of men and women as individuals who each have their own unique set of abilities, preferences, experiences etc"

Laura, I think this is a dangerous thing to do - and one which throws out of the window a vital tool in the fight for women's rights. The whole notion, for example, of indirect discrimination - fundamental to UK and European equality laws - rests on the idea of comparing the statistical impact of something upon women (or a particular race or nationality, etc.) as a group. Not all women have children, but it's still discriminatory to sack workers who fall pregnant.

Maybe this is me thinking with my lawyer's hat on - but I think the same is true across a broad spectrum of battlegrounds. If everything is individuated - if we ignore the very real differences between the dominant group and the marginal group - then we lose a powerful tool for securing change. It simply enables those with the power to ignore how the status quo has a very real discriminatory impact - not upon every individual woman, but on women as a whole. It is the serious and damaging flaw in the anti-essentialist position. (What is the phrase? 'Divide and rule'.)

Sorry - I had quite forgotten we were supposed to be talking about writing!

[Emma Darwin]

Going back to writing, Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing - has a fascinating account of being the only female judge of a big short fiction competition, and finding that she and the others had completely different ideas - the story she thought the best they simply didn't get at all. She was a SF writer, so it's not that they liked starships and she liked cake-making, or anything like that.

If you haven't come across it, it's the most brilliant book - you could call it a polemic, but that wouldn't be fair because it's much better argued than the term usually implies. Her account of the many different ways that the dominant discourse operates - even if there's no conscious intention on the part of any given dominant group - to silence other voices and discourses is fascinating.

Not in print any more, (it was The Women's Press, I think) but there are copies around on Abebooks, I know.

[ireneintheworld]

my grandson has been brought up in glasgow, spent his whole life surrounded by glaswegians and one other; his father is from birmingham. so who does he sound most like? yes you've guessed it, his father. how does he end up with a brummie accent in this situation? because his father never shuts up - he is continually whining and complaining and never lets an argument go; he comes back into the room again and again to revive old discussions, trying to win a foothold but usually not succeeding.

he gives the appearance of the good parent, always talking to the child, guiding and teaching when there is someone else present - i often think about the tree falling in the forest when no-one is there to hear; does it still make a sound? is he such a patient teacher and guide when they are alone? my suspicions lead me to, 'he doth protest too much'. sorry i've gone off on a waffle about his personality, but to me he is exactly what i don't like or trust about men; the what's underneath thing.

i really do worry about him turning my grandson into a man like him and pray that the balance my daughter can inject into the situation makes some serious impact. x

[Laura Vivanco]

"The whole notion, for example, of indirect discrimination - fundamental to UK and European equality laws - rests on the idea of comparing the statistical impact of something upon women (or a particular race or nationality, etc.) as a group. Not all women have children, but it's still discriminatory to sack workers who fall pregnant."

I did put in "the caveat that certain groups of individuals will share similar experiences, similar physical characteristics, etc." Those shared experiences might include the experience of being treated differently on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, age etc.

It seems to me that one of the reasons that it's so often necessary to look at "the statistical impact of something upon women (or a particular race or nationality, etc.) as a group" is because racism, sexism, homophobia etc lump people into groups and discriminate against them on the basis of their membership of that group. To counteract that discrimination, studies of the impact of discrimination will have to accept those particular groupings as the basis for study.

And yet, as a person, each one of us belongs to more than one group. We will each have a unique identity that is shaped by our age, position in our families (or whether we don't have one), our skin-colour, nationality/nationalities, culture(s), gender, sexual orientation, religious/spiritual/ethical beliefs, politics etc.

I find it helpful to think of this in terms of a Venn diagram, in which each grouping is a circle, but the circles overlap, and if you make the diagram complicated enough, you'd probably find that each individual is a member of many different groups, but stands as a unique example of a particular combination of intersections between groups.

Just as a book can be placed within a literary movement, a time period, and a genre, but still be a unique work of literature, I think we can simultaneously think of a person as a member of one group, a member of a variety of different groups, and as a unique individual. And while in one context it may be helpful to look at an individual as part of a particular group (e.g. when trying to target people who might need screening for cervical cancer, or providing antenatal care), at other times it may be necessary to look at a person as a member of multiple groups (e.g. a women, who is pregnant, and who is HIV positive), or as an individual with very specific, highly personal needs.

To get back to books, there are prizes just for women writers, presumably to counteract the way that "great literature" was long considered pretty much the preserve of white males. But women don't all write the same kind of books. Some write mysteries, others write romances, some write literary fiction, and so on. And even women who write in the same genre don't all write exactly the same way.

[Emma Darwin]

Have a heart, you guys - can you be a bit less interesting? I'm supposed to be checking the proofs of A Secret Alchemy, which is a job that requires absolute concentration, while being carefully designed to make one fall asleep, because you must avoid actually getting into the story. Reading/moderating/discussing comments is so much more appealing...