Language and gender in blogs/discussion forums?

language and gender in blogs/discussion forums?


Hello. I am doing a project on language and gender on either weblogs or discussion forums.





For this project i have to collect data, but im having trouble knowing how many blogs to collect or how many discussion forums to use.





I will also be conducting a linguistic analysis on them with is part of the project, such as the use of internet language (emotions, linking), conversational style such as use of evaluation, pronouns and intensifiers and multimodality. I will also have to look at metaphor if there are any and comment on the length of post





If there is anyone who has already done work on language and communication in relation to an online environment, i would be grateful for any help.





Obviously i think i need quite a substantial amount, but the questio is how many would i need to look at?

Language and gender in blogs/discussion forums?
I don't know. Ask aol.
Reply:Hi, i'm studying a degree in lingusitics and for my alevels i studied language and gender and language and communication for my language change paper. Although For my coursework i did language acquisition, i still had to collect data and well you need a resonable amount of data. So what i would say is, collect blogs/instant messaging conversations of maybe 10-15 girls and 10-15 guys. You have to make sure that they are all the same in length, so say it may be a 10min conversation (which may show you who responds quicker out of the gender showing better turntaking). There is alot of stuff on language and communication you can get a hold of to help you, there is also alot to in these books on language and gender. And what you can do is then come up with your own results with support from your own analysis.


The books below are what i used to revise for my language and communication exam so hopefully they'll help you out. They key is to make your analysis and support it with someones theories or even state how you're analysis doesn't support those theories. And when placing you're data, make sure you analyse that because you get marked for that too so annotate it like hell!


Hope that helps!