A research project in Turkey examined whether and how drinking affects the quality of one’s writing. This was “hard”, rather then “soft” science – it ignored anything fuzzy and hard-to-measure, such as the literary quality of the writing, or its emotional content. The experiment focused, with great discipline, on something that can be more objectively gauged: the extent to which drinking makes people’s penmanship go wobbly.
The goal: to establish that a sometimes-suspect criminal justice tool is dependable, accurate and precise.
Faruk Acolu, of the Council of Forensic Medicine, Istanbul, and Nurten Turan, of the University of Istanbul, published their study, “Handwriting Changes Under the Effect of Alcohol“, in the journal Forensic Science International…
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So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.