I wish I could give more information on this matter than I have, but here goes. In the early 80s, when I was at York Universiy, a friend of mine in the Mathematics Department took part in a statistical analysis of the Letters of Junius, which appeared anonyously in the Morning Advertiser in London in the early 1760s. They were ascribed to almost every writer of the age, from Birke to Gibbon. Macaulay was convinced on external evidence that they were by Philip Francis. Byu analysing the Letters and other writings acknowledged by Francis, my friend assured me that Macaulay was right. I believe that similar tests have been run on works ascribed to Shakespeare, though I don't know what conclusions were reached. It would be interesting to be able to write software that could mimic a style. I hope that won't happen, since it would strip me of what small advantage I have when writing. Sean Gabb, Editor Free Life. On Fri, 16 Feb 1996, jim bell wrote:

At 09:20 AM 2/16/96 -0800, Alexander Chislenko wrote:

...

I ran my essays through Word grammar checker a while ago, and was surprised how stable the grammar statistics were. Complexity of the text (grade level) was the same to the decimal point, average length of sentences was consistent, etc. People also use the same styles of smileys or *highlights*, make consistent spelling errors, have their habits of indentation, etc.

What's the next step? Writing a program which "fakes" somebody's style, right?