Is there a graphologist in the house?

witteringsfromwitney

No - they are just both uneducated!

unseen

the unusual absense of fullstops - and the archaic use of indented paragraphs rather than line breaks - in both letters means only one thing.

It means the two letters were probably written by the same person.

Oscar

So much for 'education education education'. No wonder they don't think standards of literacy are slipping.

Common Place

Lady Macbeth Out damn spot

I claim my prize also for song competition last week

BrianSJ

Having spent some of the morning proofreading for work, I can say that there is a full stop in Gordon's letter, line 18 after government. So, the typewriter key worked.
The analysis missed the vital point made by Dizzy; that Brown re-interprets her resignation as being part of the reshuffle.

Pete Hoskin

BrianSJ: good spot. The plot thickens!

Anthony

'A quick internet search for "graphology" and "no full-stops" has proved fruitless...'

Of course had you found any results it would have been an equally fruitless exercise, graphology being a load of old nonsense.

c

there illiterete

logdon

Maybe her school thought that learning capitals was as far as they'd get.

Listening to the way they speak also convinces me that sentences were a step too far.

Winston Place

Blears went to the same school has my children, Wardley High School, Swinton.
Not a patch on Farnworth Grammar School my darling Joyces School.
Alan Ball's and Kenneth Wolstenholmes school.

Pete Hoskin

Anthony: this is a slightly tongue-in-cheek exercise...

Dan

Agree with unseen.
Weird writing style and such a specific repeated error can only mean both letters were written by the same person.

GS London

My theory is thus: panic. As mt Collins acknowledges, the letter is bland and vague, and probably took no more than a few moments to write. Rather reminiscent of the greater proportion of Labour literature, legislation, propoganda etc etc...

David Louis

The classical and educational use of continuous prose is not the reason why Messrs Brown and Blears left them out.

One thing i did enjoy taking the time doing is adding the fullstops in myself

you can change the entire meaning of the letters.

RobertD

These letters are the product of NuLab education. A complete lack of understanding of grammar.

James

Shame they didn't use teh humble telegram to correspond.

The following from Blears would have adequately expressed her throughts and those of the nation:

Gordon Brown STOP

AAE

The absence of full-stops is another part of the equality agenda - the world is a better place now that the hierarchy of the imperialist sentence structure has been removed!

Tiberius

It's the result of too much e-mailing and txt-spk, and was no doubt chosen as the means of communication to avoid the fatal electronic trail.

But being NuLab, they've Ballsd it up again.

Nick Kaplan

Full stops are oppressive little things, they impede progress and in that respect are much like conservatives, they must therefore be eliminated forthwith!

Chris

It's surely no surprise that the Labour Party has no point; or alternatively, that the Labour Party is reluctant to come to a stop.

Hawkeye

unseen said: "It means the two letters were probably written by the same person."

Not quite - it probably means that the two letters were TYPED by the same person.

Given Brown's known problems with his eyesight I am sure he did not type his own reply, but what if Blears's note was handwritten and was typed up by the No10 typist for "release" to the press?

Bl**dy sloppy typist not to put the full stops in ....

Mr Green

Brown may have noticed the lack of thought in Blears' resignation (ie, no punctuation) and so, not wanting to be undermind, he responded in the same flippant way.

Gawain

You've all missed the point (pun intended). The Labour Party are a progressive, Post Modernist party. Language is just a meaningless discourse of power. Words mean whatever you want them to. There is no need for punctuation in their world because everything is pointless.

JK

That is likely an artifact of their having been run through optical character recognition for conversion to electronic formats. I suspect the original letters contain full stops, as well as different fonts and formatting.

Moraymint

It's a civil service writing convention based on a time-and-motion study which shows that NOT typing full-stops saves, er, time and money.

Quite when the Government started giving a toss about saving time-and-money is another question.

paracelsus

It's probably the same person responsible for setting standards in A Levels and GCSEs.

No wonder they think an ex postman will make a worthwhile PM. He is not to be trusted, and inarticulate as well. Is there no end to this lunacy.

Jane

It means they would both score close to zero in their year 6 writing sats! And that neither of them have a thorough approach to their tasks. No problem filling in claims forms though...

quadratus

Hawkeye (1348)
Moreover,was it "edited" in the process?

Carole

When a person writes without full stops they are normally angry, excited or upset and their mind does not provide these stops. If talking to them in person they would rattle on and on with just a gasp of breath.

Edward

Forget the Illuminati !
This lot are the Illiterati !

Pseudo-Scientist

Scientific explanation: "They were both typed on the same computer keyboard, where the full-stop doesn't work."

Alfred T Mahan

The letters are amazingly unpolished, aren't they? There isn't even a date on Gordo's and I wouldn't accept the layout for either for an important letter, they're so cramped - although I suppose you could argue that one page is enough and Gordo needs a large font to see clearly. But they solve that problem with a little editing - it'd be easy to cut 100 words from either letter without changing the meaning.

I think the normal Cabinet Office secretariat hasn't been allowed to polish them up and I wonder why on earth not? Time pressure to meet the news cycle?

Joel Engel

When a person writes, it is his hand that does the writing, but his brain that does the dictating. There have been many cases of amputees who, having lost the hand or arm with which they wrote, relearned the art with either the other hand, or the feet, or the mouth. Aside from a certain understandable shakiness caused by the difficulties of the feat, the writings were extremely similar to the originals. Trained graphologists had no trouble recognizing the same individual. From this, we see that it is the personality that is expressed on paper by the handwriting. When a person writes in a given fashion, it represents a particular personality trait, which comes directly from the brain. As a child, you were taught to write. Why don't you continue to write the way you were taught? The fact that you don't is the reason graphology exists...
Joel Engel is a professional graphologist. He authored Graphology at Home and Handwriting Analysis Self-Taught (Penguin Books) http://www.learngraphology.com