: Re: Making a female character sound more boyish/masculine There are two characters in the following dialogue. One of them (Yuki) is a tomboy. She has short hair, dresses like a man, and likes girls.

@Annie587

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The principle surely isn't difficult: have her talk about traditionally masculine subjects like mechanics and sports rather than traditionally feminine subjects like fashion and housekeeping. Especially in asides, like metaphors and analogies that she uses.

Somewhere along the line I came across a web site that claims to be able to tell whether a piece of writing was written by a man or a woman by a mechanical analysis. I ran about half a dozen paragraph by known authors through it and it got every one right. Their technique was to look for certain key words that they say tend to be preferred by one sex or the other. Like they say women use personal pronouns, especially "you", more often; while men use numbers more often. (They had a much longer list, those are just the couple I remember.)

The trick, I think, is how far to push it. Too little and the reader may miss it; too much and it becomes blatant and over the top.

(I suppose that's true of any attempt at characterization. I recall seeing a movie once where the writer apparently wanted to give the idea that two people were very religious. So as the one is leaving the other says, "The Lord be with you." If he'd stopped there it would have been plausible and given the message. But then the second character says something like "God bless you while I'm away", and then the first makes some similar religious-theme parting statement, and then the second makes another, for like four exchanges. And I could only think, what, did the writer put every religious-sounding word or phrase he could think of into this one scene?)

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