Gender in secondary students' creative writing: Changes in representation over time

This research investigates how school students have used language to represent gender in a corpus of over 250,000 words of creative writing at one site, from 1961 to 2015. Using tools from linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the research finds that popular assertions of the progress of gender reform tell an incomplete story of how femininities and masculinities are represented. While females are undoubtedly more visible in recent texts, the underlying grammatical structures employed by student writings in this corpus represent females as less active and less purposefully influential than their counterparts in previous decades