Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: how to prove that an author is lying about their background (using an example supposedly written by a 17 year old girl)
Posted Mar 26, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC
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SUPER EDIT:
I didn’t realize OP is the author & now I feel like a super dick
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All I'm seeing, like a lot of 'forensic science', is a bunch of unsourced guesses lacking clear evidence that is dressed up in the language of science - but without any of its substance. If this is really the kind of analysis that the author puts before juries, lacking any meaningful sense of the confidence of its determinations but pretending it does, how fucked up would that be?
So this is a very basic introduction to analog methods. Forensic linguists work within the law in many different capacities. What goes before a jury would be different from what goes to a lawyer or to the police. All reports would all be cited and detailed, and take many pages. This intro is for a layperson to start thinking about forensic text analysis. It is funny that you take such offense !
Many of these 'methods' have been empirically shown to be unreliable bullshit. You really shouldn't make such confident generalized statements about what is allowed to go before a jury, if only because so many jurisdictions have banned this form of 'evidence' either entirely or in part.
This wouldn't be the first pseudoscientific discipline to produce detailed and meticulously cited reports that are filled with fancy jargon and that span many pages, and it certainly won't be the last. The difference between scientific and pseudoscientific disciplines can be subtle, but it's really not so ambiguous.
Throughout the video, the author makes clear statements of fact about all manner of aspects of writing, from geographical distinctions in comma use to generational distinctions ...But what percentage of American writers and what percentage of British writers really use commas in the way she describes? I don't know, but a quick hunt through pubmed shows that she doesn't really know either. She might have a well-informed guess based on her experience as a writing teacher exposed to the habits of many students, as well as the experience of other 'forensic linguists' that this might be the case, but this kind of anecdotal experience is not a tool that can be used to meaningfully assess the confidence that she might have in this guess. So, if she were to stand in front of a jury and confidently tell them that someone is guilty based on her assessment of the authorship of a document from this anecdotal experience, she would be entirely unable to tell the jury how confident she was in that determination.
By playing a three-card-monty game with the legal system trying to convince everyone that the evidence is in the text rather than their judgment, practitioners of this art whose judgment has been repeatably shown to be unreliable get to be reimbursed for making confident-seeming statements anyway. When 'experts' in pseudo-disciplines like this infest the legal system they do incalculable harm by transforming it from an investigation into the truth to an investigation into who has the money to pay these fuckers.
Agreed.
Also something that immediately came to mind is no one has the learning history of any specific writer. What if the author picked up bits & pieces of writing styles at different points in their life. Say they lived on a military base in the states & were home schooled by a European instructor for part of their life. There are tons of different possible combinations.
Another huge factor is the writers intent or how much they even cared about technique or style or grammar at that specific time. I surely don’t focus on those things while I’m on Reddit. Yet other times I do. What if they just felt lazy at the time. Or how about just some straight up unedited errors?
Shit for a couple years my litter sister thought it was cool to spell certain things with an extra unnecessary ‘u’ like colour.
Surely you cannot positively judge someone by an online post or any random writing sample.