You asked a similar question 2 days ago. Perhaps read that post more?
More generally it’s the use punctuation and regionalised synonyms that give people away. A lot of people are similar but with enough time you can tell the differences.
How does a person judge someone else's style of writing or typing from others? Is there not a comparison for it?
Submitted 6 days ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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slazer2au@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Patnou@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Sorry accidentally clicked save. It’s updated now. Thanks for the reply and Happy 4th to you and yours much love.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Well, I’m going to come at this from a less direct angle; not necessarily addressing each question, just responding to the concept.
There’s an idea that there’s “nothing new under the sun”. It’s true in most senses. It’s more and more difficult to have an objectively original idea the longer we we a species record or pass along information. This isn’t to say that an individual can’t come up with an idea that’s new to them, just that there’s an ever growing body of written and spoken stories (be they factual or fictional), so chances get better over time that someone had previously “Simpsons did it”.
Then, you run into influences. Way back in the day on reddit, I was accused of making shit up when telling stories from my days as a nurse’s assistant because I had a tendency to fall into writing them the way I tell them, which is heavily influenced by the stories I’ve read and heard.
When I was writing back then, a lot of Vonnegut would creep in. A good bit of Palahniuk, Twain, and others as well, but Vonnegut was and is a huge influence on how I think about writing both as a reader and writer.
Thing is, I can’t do it on purpose. If I try to write like someone else, I fuck it up. But sure as fuck, when I’m letting myself fall into my natural “voice” in fiction, or factual storytelling, it comes out tinged with hints of everything I’ve ever loved. In person, I picked up my grandfather and his brothers way more than anything else. Kind of an old school raconteur style of delivery, but flavored with kind of dry delivery and deadpan humor with some absurdity thrown in to keep it from being predictable.
But more capable writers really can mimic a style. If you read Dickens, as an example, you’ll pick up the pattern eventually and realize that it reads totally different from Stoker, or Tolstoy, or whatever classic author you want to compare. Word choices, grammar, ways of describing things. I’ve never been able to quantify it, but other people absolutely can. What I tend to be good at is recognising the patterns, which is a much less useful thing.
So, what that means is that everything we read or hear colors what we think. And when those thoughts get expressed, it comes out.
Like I said, that doesn’t hit every point you asked about, but I think it stands as a reasonable response anyway