Look at the lingual patterns. It’s easy to mimic vocabulary, but that’s not as easy when it comes to spacing, punctuation, or using certain verb tenses.

You either know how to punctuate properly, or you don’t. The better your schooling was, the more you’ll use and overuse punctuation for dramatic effect: colons, semi-colons, Oxford commas,ellipses, and “em-dash” are common weapons of choice.

Women use punctuation as a Twitter sparring tool more so than men do. Why, I’m not sure.

The other thing to watch for is usage of certain verb tenses. Most people use active voice. The passive voice is where things get interesting. There are different types of passive voice and they reveal a lot about the writer.

There’s garden-variety bureaucratic passive voice, which is how elected officials speak, particularly when trying to cover their a**.

There’s the fabulously tedious probable conditional tense, where “if” is the Supreme Leader who can prognosticate deep into the future.

If someone uses passive voice in the subjunctive, it’s not even a tense. It’s a mood. A resigned, fatalistic mood that suggests the writer spent too much time being emo in AP French or Spanish class.

As much as people hate passive voice, it exists for a reason. Sometimes you have to hedge your bets. Sometimes speaking directly lands you in trouble. Sometimes it just feels good to be passive aggressive and indeterminate.

One of the funniest things on Twitter is when an account has two or more people who use it, and they’re each trying to tweet like the other person. Its like, will the real Slim Shady please stand up and tweet consistently?

This was a fun rant into the void.