# Pull out all the stops: Textual analysis via punctuation sequences

## TL;DR

This paper explores the use of punctuation sequences as a stylistic feature for authorship attribution, genre classification, and studying stylistic evolution over time, offering a novel approach in stylometry.

## Contribution

It introduces punctuation sequence analysis as a new method for stylometry, demonstrating its potential to distinguish authors, genres, and temporal stylistic changes.

## Key findings

- Punctuation sequences can differentiate authors.
- Punctuation styles vary across genres.
- Author styles evolve over time.

## Abstract

Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in "stylometry", the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?