Despite the seemingly ineffable qualities of style, great progress has been made in measuring writing quantitatively. This process, known as stylometry, can identify the influence of one writer on another or reveal the author of unattributed work. We believe that aspects of writing style may also be related to a variety of social cognitive traits, a possibility we aim to explore in this study. Here we use automated text analysis to break down participant-provided samples of writing. We compare your results to the results of similar analyses applied to the works of famous writers like the ones you see below. We can thus tell you how stylistic similar your text is to other writers'. Meanwhile, if you participate in other studies using our account system, we can correlate your results with other measures of social cognition to determine how writing style might be related to the ability to think about other people..

The task in this study is very simple: you will copy-and-paste a text sample into a box, indicate who wrote it (yourself or someone else), and what genre the sample represents. The website will then perform an automated text analysis in your browser and present you with the results, in terms of correlations between your style and that of a set of famous writers. Please note that for your privacy we do not record your text sample. The data we store from your text consists merely of the counts of various "stop words" in the sample. Stop words are content-free (or light) grammatical words such as articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns. We use these counts as a proxy measure for style, following from earlier work, making it unnecessary for us to store your entire text sample. If you wish to participate in this study, please click the "begin" button below.