Patterns Connect E-Mails and Old-School Letters

In a more unusual study, experts at the Northwestern University (NU) looked at the similarities and differences in patterns of correspondence between modern-day e-mail writers and old-school letter writers. The investigation revealed striking similarities between the two types of writing, underlined by the same patterns of human activity, the experts report in the September 25 issue of the top journal Science. The mechanisms used for correspondence are essentially the same today as they were when Charles Darwin lived, e! Science News reports.

“We are interested in identifying and understanding patterns of human behavior, in learning how we make choices. There are patterns to how we spend our days, and these models of probability, of how people allocate their time to do certain tasks, can be applied to many different areas,” explains the purpose of the new research NU McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science professor of chemical and biological engineering Luis Amaral. He is also the leader of the investigation.

The NU science team focused on the correspondence archives of 16 famous historic figures, including Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ernest Hemingway. Letters from other writers, performers, politicians and scientists were also looked at. The experts determined that all of the letters were sent randomly, but in cycles, and say that a mathematical model they applied to e-mails in a previous study also applies to handwritten letters.

The Science paper reveals that most of the analyzed characters had the tendency of writing more than one letter in the same sitting, which is naturally the most efficient way to take care of correspondence. However, it also became clear that virtually none of the historic figures necessarily wrote the most important letter first. Rather, it looks like the order in which the texts were written was determined by chance and circumstances.

“People are not that rational. If a doctor, for example, better understands how we make decisions, he or she may be able to get better compliance with a treatment if it is tied to something a person does with regularity,” Amaral adds. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist. The letters the team analyzed spanned a period of time between 1574 (Sir Francis Bacon) to 1966 (Carl Sandburg). Each of the texts had the names of the sender and the recipient, and the date it was sent, written on them.