Linguistic Fingerprints: How Language Creates And Reveals Identity, by Roger Kreuz

This book has a highly interesting premise. Can we determine, with the aid of modern technology as well as a bit of intuition and insight, the particular voice of an author? Can we use knowledge of such matters as word and sentence length and specific choices in terms of vocabulary whether words attributed to them are genuine, anonymous works are recognized, and forgers deterred? This sort of work has a lot of promise, and also a lot of danger, in that people have long sought to disguise their voice by writing anonymously what they did not feel comfortable putting their name to or claimed to write under a different name for more popularity. As one might guess, though, this book does not quite reach the claims that it wishes, largely because the author cannot get out of his own way when it comes to speculating on political and religious matters that are beyond his ken. In particular, the author’s failure to account for various factors (including content and co-writers and scribes) with regards to Paul’s writings gives the book a bit of an anti-Christian edge that is unwarranted, and likely to alienate some readers (like myself).

In particular, one of the notable aspects of this work is determining just what extent the finding of linguistic fingerprints is a matter of art and science. A great deal of computational power is necessary to determine the likelihood of someone writing anonymous works, and so long as someone works in rather consistent genres and ways, their writings tend to cluster around each other, thus showing at least that people write in much the same way, something that makes sense on an intuitive level at least. The issue is when people move beyond their usual style. I wonder, for example, if people would be able to recognize my own writings so easily as being all Nathanish, or if there were different styles that were adopted in different sorts of writing that made recognizable clusters. The difference might be a subtle one, but I have been told for a long time (and I believe it) that I have a pretty recognizable personal voice as a writer, and that is precisely the sort of subject matter this book gets into at its best. The only problem is that the author is not at his best all the time. Still, if you are interested in this sort of subject material this is a book that is well worth reading, albeit with a critical eye.

In terms of its contents, this book is around 175 pages or so. It begins with a prologue and acknowledgments. After this, the author discusses the idea of whether people have their own personal identifiable language and style that allows their writings to be recognized, whether or not they are formally labeled (1). This is followed by a discussion of the beginnings of the field, going back to the spurious Donation of Constantine in the Renaissance (2). After this, the author deals with cases of concealed or anonymous authorship, including writings by J.K. Rowling (3). The author then turns his attention to issues of disputed authorship, including the writers of disputed Federalist papers as well as the writings of the later Oz novels (4). Discussions of the Unabomber and other criminal cases then follow, as the ability to use language and style in crime investigations is obviously a major aspect of wanting to know how to identify people who want to remain hidden (5). After this, the author turns his attention to forgeries and misattributions, which involves a discussion of Shakespeare, as such topics inevitably get to that point eventually (6). The author then turns his attention to misses and false positives which show that this effort of finding and attributing unique authorial voices is far from perfect (7). The author ends with a return to the discussion of one’s personal voice and the difficulties one has in nailing it down (8). After this there is an epilogue, notes, bibliography, index, and information about the author.