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

[seven]

In response to this post, before I go off and write my own thing... >>

Typealyzer typed me as an ESFP based on my journal. Which is pretty laughable if you know me, but does make sense in that I use my journal as a way to reach out to my friends (E), let them know what I've been doing recently (S), and subjectively describe my experiences (F). The person in the other community you mentioned who was offering text-typing said I was all over the map, but her best guess was INFP. Which again, makes sense in context, even though I am very much not primarily Fi.

So no, my writing does not necessarily reflect my type (INTP) at all. Which I think is pretty common with INTPs, in that it's frequently mentioned that we tend to mirror the tone of environment and the other people in it to an extent when we express ourselves.

But even though I don't think it's a particularly accurate way of typing someone, I do think that typing based on the language and grammar a person uses is an interesting idea.

I wonder if anyone's tried to do this for Enneagram numbers or any other typing systems.

[syntheid]

Post? >:|

I was kind of thinking about how/if it's possible to do so for Enneagram numbers. My first thought was that it's more difficult, due to the way the Enneagram looks at motivation/drive. But then MBTI is looking at the way you think, which is also an internal thing.

These things assume that the way you write/speak reflects without distortion the way you think, when that isn't the case. Especially when the way you think is already more roundabout.

Which, thinking about it now, makes daemonology more ideal for that kind of typing, because it focuses on what you do at least as much, if not moreso, than how you think. So it's much more likely to be accurate based on what you say/how you say it. Though of course, you can still only get into the broad categories with it, and I highly doubt you'd be able to pinpoint someone using only type. Hm. I mean that's a large part of it already, isn't it?