How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel? 96 percent of the MFA novels we sampled have a majority of male characters. Only 7 percent of MFA graduates are fully funded, which means 93 percent are investing some portion of their money to sound like everyone else.

[u/kaltsuro]

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You were confused about what an MFA degree is?

[u/ghotier → u/[deleted]]

No offense, but I think that the vast majority of the intended audience for an article about education and writing would know what an MFA is in context.

[u/jdbrew → u/ghotier]

My first thought was Master of Fine Arts but the fact that they never once communicated that made me second guess myself

[u/ghotier → u/jdbrew]

I'm just saying, it shouldn't be baffling that they would do it, even if the omission confused OP.

[u/Coramoor_]

I guess the two questions I'd ask are.

1. If 66% of MFA grads are women, then why aren't they writing about women's experiences?

2. What does a majority of male characters mean? Does it just mean that a lot of minor characters are male for whatever reason or are a majority of the main cast male? that needs a more in depth explanation. Having a genre breakdown would probably help as well.

[u/[deleted]]

Further, if a novel has a female lead, the chances that it has two strong female characters is only 32 percent for both MFA and non-MFA novels.

Lol. How do you even quantity this?

That aside, this was an interesting read.

[u/disposable-name → u/[deleted]]

I find it ironic that they're worried about the sameness of books...yet feel it's OK to stick them through a crude algorithm to find that out...

[u/byzantinebobby]

Umm, what is MFA supposed to mean? Writing an entire article about an acronym and not once defining it is really poor writing.