windowpain's Journal: Submission: Women IM Like They Write, Men IM Like They Talk

In a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Naomi Barron of American University reports on some interesting differences in the way male and female college students write instant messages. 'The female IM looks more like a written genre, while the male IM looks more like a spoken genre,' Barron is quoted in a story about her research at LiveScience. Men used more contractions and took half the time women did to sign off. Both sexes multitask, however, managing an average of 2.7 conversations at a time. Nevertheless the quality of the writing was better than she expected. Out of 11,718 words there were only 123 misspelled and emoticons were used only 49 times. Other stories of note at LiveScience explain how your coworkers judge you by your iTunes playlist and how your brain is like the Internet.