Gender/Genre: The Lack of Gendered Register in Texts Requiring Genre Knowledge
Academic Article
Overview
Research
Identity
Additional Document Info
Other
View All
Overview
abstract
Some studies have found characteristics of written texts that vary with author gender, echoing popular beliefs about essential gender differences that are reinforced in popular works of some scholarly authors. This article reports a study examining texts (N = 193) written in the same genrea legal memorandumby women and men with similar training in production of this type of discoursethe first year of U.S. law schooland finds no difference between them on the involvedinformational dimension of linguistic register developed by Biber. These findings provide quantitative data opposing essentialist narratives of gender difference in communication. This essay considers relevance theory as a framework for understanding the interaction, exhibited in this and previous studies, of genre knowledge and gendered communicative performances.