I’ve been told from the start of my degree that the Oxford English course encourages and rewards ‘writing like a boy’. That I should suppress my girly girls’ school caution, precision and ’smoothness’ in favour of a more brash, brutal - and, ultimately, interesting - critical style.

This advice is patronising and generalising. I found it even more annoying personally, because my writing style did in fact subscribe to the gender stereotype that my tutor assumed it would. But it was well meant, and ultimately useful. The Oxford system rewards a certain writing style, and my tutor was right to inform me of this from the off.

Moreover, his view that this would be of potential disadvantage to me was based less on my sex than on my gendered school education. If he presumed I would ‘write like a girl’ this was based upon the fact that I went to an all-girls school, rather than upon the fact that I was a girl. And, frankly, if my privileged single-sex education put me, generally speaking, at a disadvantage in comparison to the privileged single-sex education of the other sex, it put me at a hell of an advantage in comparison to those who hadn’t experienced a privileged education at all.

Right. So, whoever you are, if you write in a masculine way you will do better than if you write in a feminine way. This theoretically has nothing to do with your biology, though practically it may be affected by it. And as this advice is more pertinent to exam-based assessment than to that based upon coursework, with the English course being increasingly coursework-assessed (though the majority of your degree still rides on final exams), the imbalance experienced because of gender is (slowly) sort of being evened out.

Which is all well and good.

But, what if it doesn’t matter if you write like a boy. What if you were told that that’s only part of the story, and that another part of it is that, actually, it would be better if you were biologically a boy too. Obviously exam papers are anonymously marked, so the actual sex of a candidate can never be known. But what if you were all but told that there were certain indications by which an examiner can guess which sex you are - and judge you accordingly.

A friend of mine, in an almost all-female English set, at a college whose English tutor is big on exam technique, was told she should definitely, unequivocally, write in black ink during exams. Big deal - so was I - it makes your writing easier to read, right? Well, partially. But the reason she was given was that it ‘makes you look more like a boy’.

Which got me to thinking. Though I always assumed (or hoped) that being more like a boy in this place has everything to do with how and what you write, and not who you actually are. I guess I was wrong. I should probably try harder at being not only masculine, but male too.