Chemistry Blog

Investigations of “excitable” female bloggers!

In a recent article by Carol Waseleski, in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, she investigates the overabundance of exclamation marks, also known as exclamation points, by female bloggers. A typical reason given for all the exclamation marks is, females are more likely to become excitable and that the exclamation marks are “markers of excitability”. But Waseleski argues that the exclamation marks are “markers of friendly interaction” and shove your gender-biases up your… At any rate, I decided to compare how many exclamation marks are seen on the front page of 3 female chem blogs that I visit frequently versus how many show up in 3 male chem blogs that I visit frequently. My data is shown below.

Female:
http://coronene.blogspot.com/   = 16
http://cultureofchemistry.blogspot.com/   = 12
http://propterdoc.blogspot.com/   = 17
Average = 15

Male:
http://www.thechemblog.com/   = 5
http://the-half-decent-pharmaceutical-chemistry-blog.chemblogs.org/   = 2
http://www.paulbracher.com/blog/   = 5
Average = 4

As can be clearly seen, female bloggers use exclamation marks more than males and thus are more friendly. I haven’t included the following blogs, because it contradicts my hypothesis.

http://thedisgruntled.blogspot.com/   = 38
http://blog.chemicalforums.com/   = 29

Note1: Link to the article can be found here. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/waseleski.html
Note2: This was brought to my attention by http://improbable.com/2006/11/18/gals/

Mitch