I'm an amateur writer that happens to be a professional programmer.
I say this because I've recently jumped back into a personal research project in which the goal is to automate the de-anonymization of passages or, more simply, figure out the true author behind an anonymous piece of writing.
In order to do this, I'm looking at the key elements in a person's writing style and looking for patterns that match up to writers and their styles that I've already indexed. The patterns I'm looking for currently are:
- Word choices & vocabulary
- Readability score: calculated by the Flesch-Kincaid index (what Microsoft Word uses)
- Punctuation preferences: whether 1 or 2 spaces are used after a sentence, frequency of exclamation points, commas, etc
- Sentence structure: where the various elements of a sentence are usually located within that sentence, as well as general sentence length
What other patterns can be used to explicitly define a writing style?
