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 […]
