An Interesting Tool I Found: The Typealyzer

I just found an interesting tool on the Internet called the Typealyzer. It is amazing! The Typealyzer is able to identify your personality type similar to the way the Myers Briggs Trait Indicator (MBTI) tool does.

Rather than answer the personality questions, the Typealyzer identifies your personality traits by analyzing your writing style.

The Typealyzer has four sections just like the MBTI. The Typealyzer labels the MBTI traits of extroversion or introversion as Attitude, sensing or intuition as the Perceiving Function, thinking or feeling as the Judging Function and judging or perceiving as Lifestyle.

After you enter the required information into the Typealyzer, your writing is analyzed and your personality type is identified with the same four letter code used in the MBTI tool.

After discovering the Typealyzer, I conducted several experiments and am sharing the results with you below. First of all, I want to tell you how simple the Typealyzer is to use.

How to Use the Typealyzer

If you have a blog, simply type in your URL address in the box that comes up when you go to the Typealyzer website.

If you do not have a blog or a website with your content, there is another personality type analyzer broken down into four parts:

• Attitude – analyzes Extroversion/Introversion
• Perceiving – analyzes Sensing/iNtuition
• Judging – analyzes Thinking/Feeling
• Lifestyle – analyzes Judging/Perceiving

Paste a sample of your writing into each of the four sections. After you press Classify your personality type will be revealed.

Experiments

The purpose of my experiments was to see if the Typealyzer would consistently identify my personality type, which is an INTJ, according to the Myers Briggs Trait Indicator.

Methodology

I used several different writing samples from both recent and past articles. I varied the input of paragraphs from different articles into the four different sections of the Typealyzer.

The procedure is described below.

1. I cut and pasted the same paragraph from an article I wrote several days ago into the four sections of the Typealyzer. The personality type identified from the writing sample was an INFJ. What is more interesting is the Typealyzer also indicated my writing style was 94% introverted, 99% intuitive, 99% a thinking and 65% judging. This is more information that I received from the MBTI tool.
2. I entered four different paragraphs from the same article into the four Typealyzer sections respectively. Again the Typealyzer identified me as an INFJ but this time my writing style was 100% introverted, 77% intuitive, 100% thinking and 71% judging.
3. I took one paragraph from each of four articles I wrote and entered the paragraphs into the four sections of the Typealyzer respectively. This time the results indicated my writing style was 100% introverted, 92% intuitive, 52% thinking and 51% judging.
4. I entered the same paragraph from an article I wrote several years ago into the four sections of the Typealyzer. This time my personality type changed from an INFJ to an INFP. The results showed 100% introversion, 86% intuition, 98% thinking and 83% perceiving.

Findings

The following table summarizes data collected from my four experiments with the Typealyzer using different samples of my writing.

Discussion

When I look at the table above, it shows that my writing has a consistent introverted intuitive style as shown in experiments 1-4. In experiment number 3, the thinking trait is 52% and not consistent with the first two experiments.

Article number 3 was written for a scholarly journal and I wonder if the lower thinking percentage can be attributed to using both my personal knowledge and experience combined with a few references from other scholarly articles to support my topic.

In experiment number 4, my thinking trait is replaced by an 83% perceiving. The only reason I can think of is I was more easy-going in those days!

An Aside

A few years back I marked a group of papers for a fourth year university class. I easily identified six papers that were written by the same person. I was also suspicious of several more.

At the time I was aware of a program for detecting plagiarism. If I had been aware of the Typealyzer I could have tried to match the writing style to the student’s personality. That would have given me more confidence when I confronted the suspected students!