Does Your Writing Style Have a Fingerprint?
Listen to Slate’s show about the surprising way mathematicians can determine authorship.
Is it possible that your writing style is identifiably unique? In the late 1800s, a Polish philosopher named Wincenty Lutosławski imagined a “future science of stylometry,” whereby the singular style of an author could be quite literally measured. In such a future, controversies over authorship would be resolved not by literary scholars but by statisticians, and data would provide the answer. Sounds like pie in the sky, right? But it turns out that Lutosławski was right. Over the past 50 years, stylometrists have fashioned a promising way to identify authorial signatures using something called “lexical glue.” Listen as Bob Garfield and I talk about how a bunch of seemingly inconspicuous words actually stand out.
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Mike Vuolo is a radio and podcast producer and the host of Lexicon Valley.