Is there a somewhat reliable (like, for example 70% success rate) way to determine whether a paragraph in the English language was written by a man or a woman (adult male/female)? Any credible references to the study, and perhaps a how-to?
If this is possible, what about the general case of generally telling the difference between the writing style of a male and female person (the scope is increased to any English speaker that are 10 years or older).
Of course, professional writers may be excluded as they're probably good enough so that they can deliberately pick a writing style to suit the occasion.
Best Answer
Yes, this is possible. Deitrick et. al. (1) describes a model that yields 95% accuracy in classifying the gender of the person based on the e-mail that he/she wrote. Apparently men and women tend to have differing word choices. This research is based on the Enron corpus, and thus meets your criteria of non-professional writers (all of them were Enron employees, hence the percentage of journalists or fiction writers would probably be small).