  A writer's style depends not just on personal traits but also on her intent
and mental state. In this paper, we show how variants of the same writing task
can lead to measurable differences in writing style. We present a case study
based on the story cloze task (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016a), where annotators
were assigned similar writing tasks with different constraints: (1) writing an
entire story, (2) adding a story ending for a given story context, and (3)
adding an incoherent ending to a story. We show that a simple linear classifier
informed by stylistic features is able to successfully distinguish among the
three cases, without even looking at the story context. In addition, combining
our stylistic features with language model predictions reaches state of the art
performance on the story cloze challenge. Our results demonstrate that
different task framings can dramatically affect the way people write.
