Also called: computational stylometry, stylistic analysis
Stylometry is the statistical measurement of writing style — sentence length, function-word frequency, punctuation habits, hedging and vocabulary distribution — used to characterise or identify an author from text alone.
It is a century-old method from authorship attribution, now used to build machine-readable descriptions of how one person writes.
Stylometry predates language models by decades. Its classical use is authorship attribution: deciding which of several candidate authors wrote a disputed text, by comparing distributions of features the author does not consciously control. Function words carry most of that signal precisely because nobody chooses them deliberately.
The same measurements serve a newer purpose. If a set of features characterises an author well enough to identify them, the same features can be handed to a language model as a target to write toward. That is the bridge between stylometry as forensics and stylometry as personalisation.
| Feature family | Example | Why it carries authorial signal |
|---|---|---|
| Function words | the, and, of, but, rather | Chosen unconsciously; frequency is stable per author |
| Sentence length distribution | mean and variance of words per sentence | Rhythm is habitual and hard to fake deliberately |
| Hedges and boosters | perhaps, might / clearly, certainly | Encodes how strongly an author commits to claims |
| Punctuation habits | semicolon rate, dash rate, comma density | Learned early, rarely revised |
| Vocabulary richness | type-token ratio and variants | Reflects reading history and domain |
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MyWritingTwin. “Stylometry.” Last updated 2026-09-15. https://www.mywritingtwin.com/glossary/stylometry