The first aim of this study was to examine whether there were differences between how the Swedish male and female L2 students wrote their texts. Overall, in the eight different variables that were measured there were few clear differences found. Previous research predicted that higher frequencies of nouns, prepositions, modifiers, specifiers, numerals and number of words are indicative of male writing style and thus are male markers whereas more pronouns and longer sentence length would be female markers. Results consistent with this could only be seen when it came to pronouns and modifiers. Consequently, all the other variables showed no difference between genders or in fact the opposite result to that predicted by previous research. In terms of specifiers and numerals, the results show no differences in frequency between male and female students while frequencies of nouns, prepositions, sentence length and number of words showed results contrary to those predicted. One reason why this study’s results differ from the expected results may be because the number of participating students in ULE is too small. A statistically deviant result from one or a few students might have a big impact on the results compared to in a large survey. In this case, since the male participants in this study were fewer, the male markers might be harder to prove because the impact of statistical irregularities in male frequencies are larger than in female.
The second aim was to examine whether it was possible to find a pattern in these presumed differences above, that could support what Biber (1988) calls an involved respectively an informative writing style. In this study, the only variable measured that belongs to the involved writing style is pronouns. However, even though the female students used more pronouns than their male peers, more features associated with this style would need to have been measured to show a reliable pattern, for example, present-tense verbs and contractions (Argamon et al. 2003: 332). When it comes to the male informative writing style, where the variables that specify the ‘thing’ are prepositions, modifiers, specifiers and numerals (Argamon et al. 2003:334) it was also difficult to find a clear pattern. In fact, only one of the four groups29showed a higher male mean frequency which may be because the study was partly done on a small number of essays and that there were significantly fewer male than female authors. This could mean that one or a few statistically different male values have a major impact on the result. The qualitative part of the study showed various results that in most cases were not expected (see section 6) in relation to previous research (see section 2.2). Instead, it was probably more an expression of individual differences with little connection to gender, something Pennebaker and King (1999) call a “linguistic fingerprint” (see section 2.2).
Finally, it can be concluded that to achieve a statistically reliable result that confirms or contrasts conclusively with previous research findings, large corpus-based quantitative studies are preferred for this type of studies. Although this study was unable to show several major differences in writing styles between genders, previous research does suggest that there are differences between how men and women write (Newman et al. 2008; Argamon et al. 2003).
2021. , p. 33