you are what you write?

[syntheid]

Something that came up lately in a different personality typing community I'm still part of was the idea of typing people, literally, by the way they type (in this case into MBTI types). Personally, I find it interesting, and as a linguist, do think there could be styles of speech/typing that are common to particular types, but I have a hard time seeing this as a good means of typing itself. There are many types who would be inclined to deliberately change the way they type or who have the ability and tendency to mimic other types, for one, and various other environmental variables could affect the way you decide to interact on a particular community.

For an example, there is the website Typealyzer that tries to automatically type you by your blog text that you can play with, but I know at least for me, it's very far off on what it types me as.

So what I'm curious about is whether or not you think your writing reflects your type-- I know mine doesn't always, because I'm one of those who deliberately manipulates style for affect. Does the Typealyzer get it right for you and if it does, do you think it's a fluke or if there seems to be some truth to the algorithm's analysis? Also do you feel you can type others using the way they write?

Additionally, if your typing system of choice is MBTI/Jung, do you put more value on functions or individual letter dichotomies? Have you found a correlation of methods to types (like I've noticed INTx types have a tendency to prefer functions)?

Comments

[juniperphoenix]

Interesting! I tried the Typealyzer on my journal and on a few of the fanfics I've written. It didn't type me correctly, but I can see why it came to the conclusion it did based on the way I use my journal. For the fanfics, it did a pretty good job of identifying the tone of each story — a story centered around musical performance tested as an artistic type, whereas a story told from the point of view of a computer tested as more analytical.

IMO, the algorithm seems to do a pretty good job of analyzing what it's given, but it has no way to deal with the reality that people may only blog about a small part of themselves (or, as you suggest, affect a certain writing style). I wonder whether it would be more accurate for extraverts (and/or people who are simply more open in their blogs).

[syntheid]

That's interesting to note-- that it was getting the tone of the fiction right. It doesn't seem to do too bad at typing the general/surface feel of writing. I wonder what it's actually monitoring, exactly, since if it's just word choice, that would make sense why it's okay at picking out general tone, but can't get any further. Grammatical pattern and sample variety take it a step beyond that, but having seen someone use that method and taking all that into account, it still seemed like there's another component to it that's missing.

I was going to say I hope an extrovert tries it and can tell us, and realized there are no extroverts on this community at the moment. Ah well. I'd guess, as I was saying to sakurablossom above, that ESFx is a common typing for that algorithm on sites like this due to the content, so it would be "more accurate" if someone happened to be an ESFJ/ESFP, but it seems almost like it's just guessing correctly on accident then. I should try putting some non-journal text in and see what it gets from that, though.