Researchers have concluded that there exist certain patterns
in the way we write. Presenting here a beautiful example: Back in 1788, there
were a group of three writers who individually authored 85 papers on US
constitutional reforms. Suppose the authors were A, B and C. Now, the papers
did not have the names of the authors. It was a popular belief that 51 of the
papers were authored by A, 14 by B and 5 by C. This still left 15 papers
unaccounted for.
Now, it was to be found who wrote the disputed papers. Various
linguistics were asked for help. But since the papers were on varied topics and
the writing styles were not very disparate, there was no definitive outcome.
Now, arithmetic was tried to solve the riddle. The average length of the
sentences was tried out, but the average varied from paper to paper. There was
no definitive trend which could separate the authors. The use of various words
like ‘while’ and ‘whilst’ was tried, that could not help as well.
Next, a set of 30 words were identified like ‘the’, ‘by’, ‘upon’,
‘and’, ‘there’, ‘enough’, ‘according’ etc. And the usage of all these words (density
per 1000 words) for all the papers by the three authors was measured. The results
were simply astounding. Author A and B used ‘the’ at a rate of 91 and 94 per
thousand words. Whereas C used ‘the’ at the rate of 64/1000; this clearly
demarcates C from A and B.
B used ‘upon’ at a constant rate of 3/1000 whereas C never
used the same. Similarly, A used ‘by’ at a constant rate of 13/1000 and the
rate was constant for B at 5/1000. Thus all these trends were identified (the
numerical fingerprints were decoded) and the authors of the disputed authors
were identified with a fair level of accuracy.
Thus, the post shows that there are patterns, hidden
fingerprints even in the way we write. So start comparing you text with some of
your friend’s and see if you can observe something interesting.
Love,
Ankit
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