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This proof of evidence only came
to light after the person who was supposed to
have written it had died. It was produced some
weeks after the first day of evidence only a few
minutes before it was to be used as evidence on
the second day of evidence - the person having
died just over a week before. There was no
opportunity to check it in any way. |
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The solicitors were unable to
supply any version with a signature and
eventually admitted that there had not been a
signed version. Further, this proof of evidence
contains statements that the person who was
supposed to have written it would have known at
the time of writing to have been false - these
statements going on to contradict evidence
already given both verbally and in writing during
the first day by the company. |
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The person who was supposed to
have written it did not have legal training and
certain words crop up here that analysis of all
other texts written by him and records of words
said by him show occurred nowhere else. |
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The
text remains complete in all respects except for
the names of those concerned. All of the names
have been changed - first names to names selected
randomly from a babies' names book and last names
selected randomly from an English place-names
dictionary. |
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The question is how many people
wrote it? This is where sophisticated analytical
techniques come into play. These are up to
you.
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Corel WordPerfect is freely
available and has the Grammatik grammer checker
which gives statistics - many do not. In
addition, simpler methods may be used such as
measuring the proprtion of given words. Automatic
Grammar checking and word ratios are computer
based and are mechanical and rely upon there
being enough of a sample to make them reliable -
whole texts can be shown to have the same or
different ratios as other texts and lead to clues
about their authorship. Another thing to consider
is that people's texts do vary to some extent -
the question being; Does this text show signs
of varying that a known consistent text does not?
In addition, these mechanical methods do not take
into account the choice of words to express
anything.
Choice of words can distinguish between
authors and, where a text is on the short side
may have the edge over the mechanical methods.
Styles do change over a long period of time but
it must be remembered that in the case of this
document, we know that it was written only in a
few weeks - not enough time for anything to
change significantly.
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Try anything you like and e-mail me with your
answers stating what you do for a living (student,
writer, university professor, forensic scientist,
car mechanic and so on) and where in the
world you are from (town, district and
country will do). I will publish the results
- not any names. I look forward to hearing from
you. To see analysis already done, look at the
Results Page.
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Note
- there are two people called Ledston. In addition,
the fifteenth paragraph is not numbered, the
sixteenth paragraph is labelled 15 and so on. To
be consistent, call the paragraph after paragraph
14, "14a".
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If you want to download
the text file - poe.txt (16,188 Bytes) -
click here (you may have to right-click
and choose to save the page as . . .),
otherwise just save the page or highlight it and
copy it to wherever you want for analysis. |
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