This writing’s CRIMINAL!
A brilliant investigator solves crimes by analysing the crook’s prose style. Shame about his own...
How can you tell if this review is written by me, or by someone pretending to be me? Your first step should be to look for telltale words and phrases or even peculiarities of punctuation that I have used in previous articles.
For instance, I use the word ‘even’ rather more frequently than most writers, not to mention the word ‘rather’ and, as it happens, the phrase ‘not to mention’. Oddly enough, I also have a slightly irritating habit of using the phrase ‘oddly enough’ to begin sentences. But if someone clever were pretending to be me, they would already have noticed these particular traits and would ape them to make their impersonation more convincing. So, for a more thorough investigation, you would probably have to contact a forensic linguistics expert such as John Olsson, adjunct professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and visiting professor of forensic linguistics at the International University of Novi Pazar, Serbia, no less. Prof Olsson specialises in working out who wrote what, based purely on their writing style, and its associated tropes, such as where they place commas or dashes. It is his contention – and I’m sure he is right – that no two people write the same and that, subjected to careful study, even the most diligent impersonator can be detected. As Shakespeare noted, ‘every word doth almost tell my name’. Prof Olsson starts More Wordcrime by saying what he does not do. He does not analyse handwriting or perform a psychological evaluation of any given writer. He does not try to work out whether a writer is lying or telling the truth. He simply scrutinises different documents – not just letters but texts and emails and so on – and tries to work out if they were written by the same hand. A fairly typical case involved threatening letters sent anonymously to a businesswoman. The first letter began: ‘Just thought Id tell you I’m going to pay you a visit cos that’s the job I do. Visit people. It’s a bit sad for me that they don’t seem to like me visiting them. Well, not much anyway.’ The writer then added, nastily, that he was writing on behalf of someone who was ‘capable of hurting people beyond their wildest dreams’. The woman suspected the writer might be a middle-aged businessman whose sexual advances she had rebuffed a few years before, and who now wished to frighten her. Luckily, she had kept a number of business emails he had written to her before the rebuff, so Olsson was then able to compare the business emails with the threatening letters. Were they written by the same man?
Close examination showed the two had much in common: both used the abbreviation ‘cos’ instead of ‘because’ and began sentences with ‘Well’, followed by a comma. More tellingly, both writers wrote ‘D’you know’ rather than ‘Do you know’, a habit that is, Olsson observes, ‘extremely rare’.
For these and other reasons, Olsson concluded that this businessman was also the anonymous letter-writer. The victim sent Olsson’s report to the police, the police confronted the businessman, and the businessman immediately confessed. Hey presto! A triumph for forensic linguistics!
An infinitely more chilling case involved the murder of English teenager Ashleigh Hall, who, in October 2009, had been due to meet a young man called Pete whom she had been chatting to on Facebook. As he couldn’t drive, Pete texted that his father would pick her up from her home: ‘My dad’s
on his way babe he said excuse the state of him lol He’s been at work lol he doesn’t have to come in and meet your mum does he lol he’ll be a mess probably lol x’
A little later Ashleigh received a text from the father: ‘Hi hun it’s pete’s dad are you sure you dont mind me picking you up? Pete is really looking foreward to seeing you and yes its ok for you to stay’
Sure enough, Ashleigh got into the car. Her best friend then exchanged reassuringly chatty texts with her about The X Factor. An early one from Ashleigh read: ‘I liked that ollie he was realli gd i thought, his dancin was mint haha x x’
And a later one read: ‘Haha thts great tht programme i watch it all the time haha’
The next day, a 33-year-old convicted rapist called Peter Chapman was stopped in his car by police. While they were questioning him, Chapman suddenly confessed to killing Ashleigh the night before but claimed that he had smothered her by accident.
It soon became clear that Chapman had sent all the texts that purported to come from both the young man and his dad. But did he also send the texts that seemed to have been sent from Ashleigh to her best friend, using Ashleigh’s phone, after he had killed her? The best friend had certainly thought they came from Ashleigh but had they in fact come from her murderer?
At this point, Olsson was called in. He immediately recognised that Chapman had a diabolic talent for impersonation, both for being a male teenager and also for being the boy’s father. But he also spotted a number of revealing discrepancies between the texts purportedly from Ashleigh before and after she got into the car. First, the real Ashleigh kept her texts as brief as possible: the last two texts were more wordy.
Second, she never wrote ‘Haha’ both at the beginning and at the end of her texts. Finally, Olsson thought it unlikely that a girl who constantly sent texts to her best friend would need to remind her that she watched X
Factor ‘all the time’: surely any best friend would already know? What of Olsson’s own linguistic characteristics? I’m afraid to say that though a fair number of his cases are quite interesting, the way he writes about them is not. He has the prose style of a particularly cautious solicitor’s clerk – ‘apparently, a not inconsiderable number of people came to believe…’ – and that sort of thing. Instead of writing ‘he or she’ or ‘they’, he writes ‘s/he’.
He can be oblique and repetitious, and sometimes both at the same time. Instead of saying ‘Google’, on four different occasions he calls it ‘a well-known internet search engine’, as though its very existence were top-secret. Often, the points he makes are almost embarrassingly obvious. ‘It is clear that in most cases an adult will have a significantly richer vocabulary than an adolescent, who, in turn, will have a somewhat richer vocabulary than a child.’ Golly! We hardly need a visiting professor of forensic linguistics at the International University of Novi Pazar, Serbia, to tell us that.
He is also prone to finishing off his casestudies with banal little homilies. For instance, at the end of a brief chapter about how one company dissed another on the internet under the guise of consumer feedback, he concludes: ‘Nobody minds a bit of competition but at least it should be honest and above board.’
Most of the time, he takes extraordinary care to avoid being judgmental or outspoken but then he’ll suddenly fire off, as though overcome by a temper tantrum. ‘Our hysterical, immature press, fuelled by irrational, narcissistic, self-serving politicians…’ begins one sentence. And then he goes back to being bland and cautious. On such occasions, it is almost as though there were two different writers at work. Could this be so? Send for a forensic linguist!