The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [23]
A common theme in the writing literature is that a great writer has an uncanny ear for words. The ability to capture dialogue is akin to having perfect pitch for music. World-class dialogue writers seem to intuitively know how words are used by a wide range of characters. Think of some of the leading dialogue writers in plays and movies: Arthur Miller’s stark language in Death of a Salesman, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, and most anything by William Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, Woody Allen, Tony Kushner, and Nora Ephron.
A few years ago, I gave a talk on gender and language and someone asked if playwrights and screenwriters naturally knew how women and men spoke. My wife happens to be a superb professional writer and I thought back to her work and announced with certainty: yes. There were no studies to my knowledge but I would bet a reasonable amount of money that the people who are particularly good at dialogue innately use words that are appropriate for the sex of their characters. The expert had spoken.
That night in my hotel room I checked my computer to see if I had some plays or movie scripts to analyze. I did: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle. Both works had a major male and female protagonist—one script written by a man, the other by a woman. A few hundred keystrokes later, I had an answer. Both Mr. Romeo and Ms. Juliet talk like men, and both Ephron’s main characters talk a lot like women. In Aldous Huxley’s words, this was the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. But maybe these two authors or scripts were a fluke.
A few days later, I met with one of my graduate students, Molly Ireland. Although Molly knew a lot about psychology, her undergraduate training in literature and philosophy gave her a particularly broad perspective on plays and movies. She eagerly took on a large-scale project that involved analyzing over 110 scripts from more than 70 different playwrights and screenwriters. Such a project could answer several questions. Do writers differ in their abilities to capture the language of women and men? Does capturing the voice of the sexes vary depending on the specific play or movie? That is, one could imagine that a writer might have a sensitive leading man talk like a woman in one movie and like a macho man in another.
Fortunately, we have conducted several studies over the years where we have asked hundreds of people to wear a tape recorder as they go about their daily lives. We have also collected language samples from interviews, lab studies, and other sources. These transcripts have given us a base of thousands of conversations of men and women. Using these data, we can compare the ways that real males and females talk with the ways that leading characters in literature talk.
The results were fascinating. To make the results a bit simpler, Molly and I converted the statistics to a nine-point masculinity-femininity language scale. A score of 1 means that the lead character is speaking like a super-male. You know how super-males talk—lots of articles and prepositions, very few pronouns, social words, or cognitive words. A score of 9 means that the character talks like a super-female—essentially the opposite pattern of the super-male. And a score of 5 means the character’s language is not sex linked.
Each of the tables gives a sense of the ways different authors portray their main characters. Thornton Wilder, in Our Town, tracks the lives of several characters, including Emily Webb. We see Emily as an eager high school student who later falls in love with Joe. After dying in childbirth, Emily appears one final time in the graveyard after she has just gone back in time and watched a scene from her childhood. When she returns to her seat in the cemetery in the final scene, she talks with some of the other dead souls about the shock of watching