Can you identify who wrote a big chunk of text, if you remove all the words and examine only the punctuation. This new study says that in many cases yes, you can: “Pull Out All the Stops: Textual Analysis Via Punctuation Sequences,” Alexandra N.M. Darmon, Marya Bazzi, Sam D. Howison, and Mason Porter, SocArXiv. January […]
Tag: punctuation
Misplace apostrophes – miss out on med school?
The perennially thorny issue of apostrophe misuse has been correlated with lack-of-success at medical school. Researchers Dr Michael Cop and Dr Hunter Hatfield of the University of Otago, New Zealand, decided to test whether undergraduate medical students’ abilities in handling apostrophes might be linked to their (future) career prospects : “We therefore examined the placement […]
Whatever happened to the punctus? [punctuation studies]
Why is there such a paucity of academic literature on medieval punctuation? Is it (as Reimer, 1998, suggested) “[…] partly because there is so much evidence which needs to be studied, and partly because editors of texts have considered the effort needed to be a waste of time”? For a discussion of the subject, turn […]
What a difference a colon makes (to academic citations)
Following our recent report on the (report of the) finding that Short Paper Titles Tend to Have a Longer Reach (Improbable Research, June 16th 2016) we now inform about (research about) another possible method that academic authors might use to lever increased attention for their paper – with the disarmingly simple trick of adding a […]
Ellipsis in English Literature
Dr. Anne Toner, of the Faculty of English at Trinity College Cambridge, UK, studies varieties of incompleteness in literary works. She has recently published a book which focusses on a particular incompleteness signifier: Ellipsis in English Literature : Signs of Omission. The publisher notes : “Anne Toner provides an original account of the history of […]
Oblique Linguistic Enigmas: deciphering “NOT/NOT”
Languages, it is said, are never static – words, their meaning, their pronunciation and preferred syntax are constantly evolving. But the changes are not restricted to words – punctuation marks too, evolve. Take, for a recent example, an unusual construct from an official US Govt. source – reprinted by the UK Guardian as part of […]