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Does similar writing style in small texts such as on Twitter or long texts such as articles/novels tell us anything about similarity between

  • "thinking process" OR
  • "personality" OR
  • "writing preferences" etc.,

of the writers?

For some instances we can be sure about such correlation, for example persons who like to use abbreviation(short-form), e.g. nite(“night”) or abbreviation(acronym), e.g. lol (“laugh out loud”), or emoticons in short-texts like tweets, are hesitant to write long words(I couldn't find any research on this , but this is being said after a small survey by me and also this deduction seems trivial). Of course, there can be a number of reasons for some preferred writing style like role of culture.

Similarly can we say something about relation between the people who follow similar writing style? By similar writing style, I meant following kind of things,

  • short-text : use of emoticon vs writing emotion in plain text
  • short-text : use of Non-dictionary slang, e.g. that was well mint vs “that was very good”
  • long-text and short-text : preference to adjectives than combination of verb and adverb

Is there any resource throwing light in this direction in a scientific way?

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    $\begingroup$ Similar writing styles can also mean, that maybe the 'writers' got inspiration to write from the similar pieces, especially on the internet. $\endgroup$
    – Savitoj Cheema
    Commented Sep 16, 2018 at 18:10
  • $\begingroup$ Yes that can be. But it will be their choice to choose certain piece from Internet, and we know choice will vary depending on many things(one or more from the specified). So if they are sticking to similar pieces, that will imply they have some similarity. $\endgroup$
    – thepurpleowl
    Commented Sep 17, 2018 at 1:59
  • $\begingroup$ The similarities you are looking for seem rather vague to me (thinking process and personality, 'preference' on the other hand is overly trivial). Also, I am missing a motivation why you believe such similarities exist. (p.s., 'perspective') $\endgroup$
    – Steven Jeuris ♦
    Commented Sep 18, 2018 at 11:05

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To me the most obvious similarity factor would be culture/schooling. And that also creates a large confounder for the things you ask about (personality etc.)

A bit of searching did find a paper from 1981 by Ruffner & Burgoon, but it has very few citations. It also uses a pretty antiquated personality test (the Omnibus Personality Inventory). The climax of the paper is predicting various stylistic aspects using personality and education aspects:

enter image description here

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