Unwordy Analysis: Can You Identify Authors by Their Punctuation?

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]