Identification of Skilled Typists

Abstract

Skilled typists are less likely to show idiosyncratic patterns of capitalization, punctuation and spelling and are thus more difficult to identify than self-taught typists. However, categorization of the ordinary, single-letter errors made by all typists reveals differences in the error patterns among skilled typists. Initially, these errors are classified as letter insertions, omissions, substitutions and transpositions. The distribution of errors across these categories varies widely from one typist to another. Further subdividing of these categories is outlined. This approach may aid in screening possible typists of questioned documents, and possibly a similar taxonomy of handwriting errors may assist in identifying the source.