THE AUTHOR CAN RUN, BUT MAY NOT BE ABLE TO HIDE

In 1995 the novel Primary Colors, a thinly veiled mockery of the campaign of President Bill Clinton, was released by an author identified only as “Anonymous.” Within months, however, the Washington Post used handwriting analysis on an early manuscript of the book to identify the true author as political columnist Joe Klein. There is no handwriting in this case to examine. The New York Times is also well-known for heavily editing its opinion page, meaning that any tell-tale grammatical errors have already been scrubbed. Nevertheless, just as with a fingerprint, it is still possible to make a match even from a “contaminated” sample. Argamon said that a linguist would find it relatively easy to remove “consciously chosen features” that the author may have embedded in the text to conceal his/her identity. “Grammatical editing will also remove some useful features, but some would still remain,” he added.