Washington politicians left and right were fascinated and frustrated last week by the publication of an unsigned op-ed column in
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Washington politicians left and right were fascinated and frustrated last week by the publication of an unsigned op-ed column in The New York Times that told of collusion among White House staff to prevent President Trump from running off the rails.
Trump himself, of course, was frustrated most. Who was the Judas among his aides?
Anonymity made the inside story all the more intriguing. Who had written it? Amateurs and experts tried to figure that out. Some guessed about people: Who might be best positioned to know the story? Others looked for clues in the writing itself.
I thought about this when I got a phone call last Thursday from the reporter Tristin Hopper of the National Post in Canada. He wanted to know what help forensic linguistics could offer. I have advised lawyers often enough in cases seeking the authorship of anonymous documents — sometimes attempts to make it appear that someone else wrote them, sometimes just attempts to remain anonymous.
Here’s what I said:
As many have noticed, it’s hard to rely on stylistic clues when it’s a newspaper column. That’s because any stylistic quirks would most likely have been smoothed away. To avoid distracting readers with changes of style, newspapers adhere to strict norms for matters like punctuation and terminology. One or more editors would have made sure the column followed the guidelines of the Times stylebook.
We can notice that the writer encloses parenthetical remarks in dashes twice, instead of using parentheses or commas. But there’s no certainty that’s the writer’s style rather than the editor’s.
Newspapers also break stories into short paragraphs, to give readers frequent relief from the constraints of narrow columns. So paragraph size can’t be a clue.
Even analyzing the headline wouldn’t help. Editors usually write the headlines, above all needing something that attracts readers and, for printed platforms, fits the designated space.
Some observers have noticed the somewhat unusual word “lodestar,” and have looked for writers in the White House who use it too. I was struck by “concerning” used as I never would: “The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes. … " Still, one word isn’t likely to be enough to determine authorship, especially since somebody could divert suspicion by using something known to characterize some other writer.
So what’s left?
The BBC tried its own analysis, focusing on length of sentences. It found an average of 19.1 words per sentence in the anonymous column, compared with 31 for statements by the White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and 30 in a letter from President Trump to the Senate.
This is seriously misleading, however.
The column is exceedingly well written, by an author who knows that it’s not the average length of sentences that matters but the variety. You can lull your reader to sleep with sentences all the same length, regardless of what the length is. The key to good writing is to intersperse the longer sentences that carry the weight of the argument with short ones summing up or signaling a change in topics.
Anonymous does that. “I would know. I am one of them” appears early, then after a suitable interval, “Don’t get me wrong,” then after another interval, “The result is a two-track presidency.”
The BBC points out that Anonymous uses a total of three passive-verb constructions. Shocking! Government statements “prefer the active voice instead,” the BBC explains. Read over the column, however, and you’d be hard pressed to notice the three. Here they are:
In each case, the passive isn’t a result of indifference or timidity, but a clearer and more forceful alternative.
The BBC notes that only Vice President Pence among the candidates for Anonymous uses as many passives. It would take too long here to compare Pence’s with Anonymous’s, but you can see samples of Pence’s writing (admittedly from the 1990s) here, with a sentence like this beginning an opinion column:
“In the coming weeks, Americans are going to be treated with the worst kind of Washington-speak regarding the tobacco legislation currently being considered by the Congress and Attorney Generals of 40 different states.”
Passive or not, and in this case not, Anonymous has a much more forceful beginning: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
Anonymous knows to use parallel structure, putting twos or threes or fours together for comparison and contrast. Like this triplet as the second paragraph:
“It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.”
Further on, a triplet followed by a pair:
”. . . free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.”
And a triplet within a triplet:
“Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”
A paragraph that is a contrasting pair:
“This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”
Also, many sentences — but not too many — begin in varied ways with something other than the grammatical subject: an infinitive, a conjunction, a subordinate clause, a verb, a participial phrase. And not randomly, but interspersed in a manner to make memorable statements and to integrate them smoothly.
If you would look for the author, therefore, look for someone who is noted for her or his extraordinary command of language, who knows how to recruit the exact right words and deploy them artfully and memorably in sentences and paragraphs and whole essays. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind, but he’s not eligible.
