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Really?

Actually, we can see the similarities once we know that they were written by the same person. But what if we read blogs all day and came across the second one several hours after reading the first? In all likelihood, most people wouldn’t jump up yelling, “Aha! I have read that writing style earlier … yes, from the guy who wrote about hockey.” Could language experts or computers make a definitive match? Are language fingerprints as reliable as DNA or real fingerprints? The short answer is no. However, computerized language analyses do a reasonably good job at matching which writing goes with which person.

Imagine we had a large number of blog entries from twenty bloggers. Several years later, we retrieve a handful of new postings from each of the same twenty bloggers. Now imagine sitting on your living room floor with hundreds of pages of posts trying to match each current blog entry with the original posts of the twenty bloggers. All things being equal, anyone should be able to match 5 percent of the blog posts correctly just due to chance alone. Most people would do terribly on this task. It is unlikely that you would match at rates any better than 10–12 percent. The writing style differences are too subtle and there is just too much information.

Computers are more patient and systematic. If we just analyze function words, the computer correctly matches the recent blog posts with the original authors about 29 percent of the time. This is actually impressive given the time lag between the writing of the posts.

But there is more to author identification than function words. Look at the consistency of punctuation. The following woman, for example, continues to use asterisks in the same way nine years apart. This was part of an early 2001 entry:

Oh.. I have also discovered a shy streak I didn’t know I had. I guess you would call it shyness. Somebody made me *blush*. Repeatedly. That is *weird*. I don’t blush.

And in 2010:

We *are* in post-post-punk now, aren’t we? The guys in the band made a joke about how they just wrote that song yesterday, and maybe a quarter of the people in the room didn’t get why the rest of us were chuckling. weird. *shrug*

Others use punctuation in equally unique but more subtle ways. From a twenty-seven-year-old male in 2001:

I mailed memorial gift checks to Immanuel [endowment donation in honor of Joan’s mother]; and St Anne’s - for my favorite accounting professor the Smythe scholarship. Frank & Rebecca brought over “Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil” and a couple homebrews. My eyelids want to close so I better …

In 2010:

I didn’t quite know what to say thinking, “hmm, mud, what is it … when I found a mirror I didn’t see any other “brown stuff” i brought a watermelon and Costco multi-grain chips, Had a couple beers, I took Yuengling B & T - dinner was boiled/grilled chicken, okra, slaw, “dipping” brownies.

This person is the Alvin Ailey of punctuation. He jumps, swirls, swoops, and rolls with the full gamut of punctuational possibilities: [ ; - … & “/. Oddly, when I first read his blog, I didn’t even notice his use of punctuation marks—they just blended into his writing. However, when his blogs were computer analyzed, his use of punctuation stood out.

Punctuation marks can identify some people better than anything they write. In fact, when looking only at punctuation, computer programs identified 31 percent of authors correctly—essentially the same rate as relying on function words. When both function words and punctuation were used together, the computer correctly paired the original bloggers with writing samples several years later 39 percent of the time.

Punctuation, function words, and content words that are used in everyday writing are all parts of our personal signature. To appreciate this, go to your own e-mail account and spend a few minutes looking at the e-mails you send to and receive from others. Start with the page layout. Some people tend to write very long e-mails, whereas others