You can learn a lot from little words

I'm reading a book called The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us.  You might think that you aren't interested in a book with a title like that, but you should be.  Because it turns out, our words say quite a bit about us.  Especially the small ones.

Here's what that paragraph up above revealed about me:

LIWC Results

Details of Writer: 47 year old Male
Date/Time: 30 September 2011, 11:32 pm

LIWC Dimension	Your Data	Personal Texts	Formal Texts
Self-references (I, me, my)	9.80	11.4	4.2
Social words	21.57	9.5	8.0
Positive emotions	1.96	2.7	2.6
Negative emotions	0.00	2.6	1.6
Overall cognitive words	15.69	7.8	5.4
Articles (a, an, the)	11.76	5.0	7.2
Big words (> 6 letters)	9.80	13.1	19.6

If you'd like to try it on your own writing go here.

Of course, you and I can't figure out what it means, but James Pennebaker can.  He has another site set up to analyze people's tweets for personality traits.  I don't tweet, so I can't be the test subject for this one.  But let's choose someone fun.  How about James Randi?  (Really, it's the JREF and probably not Randi himself.)

Analysis of tweets from jref
(1815 most recent words - 30th September, 2011)

Emotional Style  Upbeat (High)    65   Worried (Low)    29   Angry (Very high)    92   Depressed (Low)    26

Social Style  Plugged In (High)    66   Personable (Low)    27   Arrogant/Distant (High)    65   Spacy/Valley girl (Low)    30

Thinking Style  Analytic (Low)    25   Sensory (Low)    26   In-the-moment (Low)    30

Hmm.. seems about right.  Let's go in another direction:

Analysis of tweets from katyperry
(228 most recent words - 30th September, 2011)

Emotional Style  Upbeat (Very high)    91   Worried (Average)    45   Angry (Average)    52   Depressed (Very high)    86

Social Style  Plugged In (Average)    49   Personable (Average)    52   Arrogant/Distant (Average)    60   Spacy/Valley girl (High)    72

Thinking Style  Analytic (Average)    47   Sensory (Average)    49   In-the-moment (Average)    57

Sorry to see Miss Perry is feeling blue.  Hope things are looking up for her soon.

The really interesting bit is that this information comes from the small words -- the articles, prepositions, conjunctions -- that sort of stuff.  Would you have believed it if some scientist hadn't gone out and proved it?

No.  No you would not.

But it's true.

Pronouns (such as I, you, they), articles (a, an, the), prepositions (to, of, for), auxiliary verbs (is, am, have), and a handful of other common word categories are called function words. On their own, function words have very little meaning. In English, there are fewer than 500 function words yet they account for more than half of the words we speak, hear, and read every day. By analyzing their use, we begin to learn how speakers are connecting with their audiences, their friends, their conversational topics, and themselves.

It's not just what you say, it's how you say it.

I'm only into chapter 3, but this book is right up my alley..