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THE INDIVIDUAL WAY IN which a person expresses himself in writing may yield valuable information about his personality. First, it may show permanent peculiarities which recur and lend to the written expression a distinctive color which we call the person's " style ". Second, we may detect in single utterances a certain emotion or impulse (the writer may or may not have felt it consciously) which was stimulated by the subject matter and manifests itself through a particular violence of tone, for example, or through slips of the pen, or similar phenomena. A person's style corresponds to his characteristic manner, appearance, bearing, and so forth, while the single utterance corresponds to his behavior in a specific situation. The situation may provoke the discharge of a specific emotion, and the written utterance will be no more than an expression of it, just as oral expression may give vent to an emotion.
That there is some relationship between an individual's personality and the style of his writing, that his style is in some way characteristic of him—this is common knowledge. We can frequently identify an author or a friend through his style.1 But we are interested