Forensic Graphology

[jbor]

michel.ryckx at freebel.net wrote:

> vation the thing religious
> people hope for?  Why else would religion make sense?
> 
> (3) then there's Jethro's tent.<space><space>Maybe there are in the
> bible better brothels to be found:  the harem of King Da

Yes, some also double space after question marks and colons as you do, some
after parentheses and even commas, some only after the full stops. It's
largely non-volitional and can be quite revealing:

http://www.fsbassociates.com/holt/authorunknown.htm

"Foster investigates the case of "Wanda Tinasky," the oddball California bag
lady who many believed to be Thomas Pynchon."

Excerpts:

"With unattributed texts -- say, an e-mail from a Hotmail.com address, or a
pseudonymous letter to the editor, or even a lyric poem -- it is often
impossible to connect the voice (the persona, the internal "I" of the text)
with the name of whoever actually wrote the document. But with most
anonymous texts, from Anglo-Saxon lays, to Elizabethan playscripts, to
Internet libels, stylistic evidence can take us a lot further than many
scholars and detectives have realized."

"I venture to say that no two individuals write exactly the same way, using
the same words in the same combinations, or with the same patterns of
spelling and punctuation. [...] It is that pattern of difference in each
writer's use of language, and the repetition of distinguishing traits, that
make it possible for a text analyst to discover the authorship of anonymous,
pseudonymous, or forged documents."

"While forensic experts like Henry Lee or Roy Hazelwood look at weapons and
bodies, I consider words and punctuation. They do the bullet wounds and bite
marks, I do indentation and split infinitives. They do body parts and DNA, I
handle the ABCs and parts of speech."

And so forth.

So, certainly not far-fetched, nor entirely irrelevant. But still quite sad
if true.

best