When two or more writers collaborate on a document by each contributing pieces of text, the problem can arise that while each might be an exemplary piece of writing, they do not cohere into a document that speaks with a single voice. That is, they are stylistically inconsistent. But given a stylistically inconsistent document, people often find it hard to articulate exactly where the problems lie. Rather, they feel that something is wrong, but can't quite say why.
An example of stylistic inconsistency can be seen in the following sentence, which is from a brochure given to hospital patients who are to undergo a cardiac catheterization. (The parenthesized numbers are ours, to refer to the individual clauses.)
(1) Once the determination for a cardiac catheterization has been made, (2) various tests will need to be performed (3) to properly assess your condition prior to the procedure.
Clause 1 and (to a slightly lesser extent) clause 3 are in medical talk, as if in a formal communication from physician to physician; clause 2 is much more informal, and is expressed in ordinary lay language. The effect of the two styles mixed together in the one sentence is a feeling of incongruity---which was presumably not intended by the author or authors. This example, however, is unusual in its brevity. More often, the problem of inconsistency emerges only over longer stretches of text, especially where the granularity of the multiple authorship is at the paragraph, section, or chapter level. Moreover, while stylistic inconsistencies arise primarily in jointly written documents, we do not exclude the possibility of their occurrence in singly authored texts, especially those where different parts were written at different times or, initially, for different purposes.
Our ultimate goal in this research is to build software that will help with this problem---that will point out stylistic inconsistencies in a document, and perhaps suggest how they can be fixed. In this paper, we report some of our initial explorations and data collection.
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