A Stupid Poll About Writing

I received an email asking to promote the results of a poll, as seen in this post from the Daily Beast. Even though I’m actually doing what was requested by linking to it in this post, I responded to the email and declined because I’m not into charities I’m not personally involved with, and because the ham-handed interpretation of the poll was ludicrous.

Here’s my email response:

Thanks for reaching out to me, semi-personally, but the poll results are garbage. Not that it’s necessarily Grammarly’s fault, since polls are a wildly inaccurate at quantifying a complex series of attributes that comprise an intuitive-knowledge sort of area like language or writing. But it also presumes a standard of what “better writing” could be that not everyone may agree with. Yet, since it fits conveniently with TDB’s leftoid, feminine-primary readership, it works out in your favor.

Good luck, and I hope Grammarly sells the appropriate number of subscriptions this month.

An important contextual note on the “feminine-primary” phrase. There’s nothing wrong that I can see, by definition, about women (or men) getting together by themselves, separate from the other sex. Societies around the world have been doing that since time immemorial because there is benefit to it. Whether that could be called “x-primary” organization in the modern sense matters little. This isn’t a technical, academic paper.

But the wholesale “gathering together” of one sex has been met with more politicized/socialized approval for a good many decades, to the detriment of the other sex. An artificial and “forced”, as opposed to naturally-occurring and self-organizing, favoring of one over the other will always cause an imbalance in a binary system. The subject was already on the docket given the nature of the poll and the title of the post so it’s not an untoward gesture to give it a mention.