For employees

Can your writing style identify you?

Adam Johnson (founder)

26 Mar 2026 — 2 min read

When an employee submits a workplace concern, they're taking a risk. Even when a reporting tool promises anonymity, the words themselves can give them away.

This isn't paranoia. It's linguistics.

Writing style is a fingerprint

Every person writes differently. The words you choose, the length of your sentences, whether you use contractions, how you punctuate. These patterns are consistent and surprisingly unique. Researchers have been able to identify authors from writing samples for decades, and the same principles apply to workplace reporting.

If you're the only person within your team who writes "to be honest" or tends to open sentences with "Look,", a perceptive manager may not need your name to know it was you.

Why this matters for anonymous reporting

Most anonymous reporting tools stop at removing your name. They don't touch the content. So while your identity isn't technically attached to the submission, your voice still is. In small teams, this is a real concern. The fewer people in the room, the easier it is to narrow down who said what.

How HowsWork handles this

HowsWork gives employees the option to have their concern rewritten by AI before it reaches an employer. The original content is preserved. The incident details, the context, the substance. But the language is stripped of identifying patterns, including unusual word choices, stylistic quirks, and familiar phrases, and rewritten into a consistent, neutral voice.

This includes more than just writing style. The AI also removes personal identifiers that could narrow down who submitted a concern. References to how long someone has been at the company, details about physical appearance, mentions of an accent or the way someone speaks, anything that could be used to identify a specific person is removed or rewritten before the concern reaches your employer.

Before the rewritten version is submitted, you can preview it and make sure it still captures what you want to say. Nothing is sent until you're satisfied with it.

The result is that what an employer receives reflects what happened, not who wrote it.

When people feel safe, they speak up

This isn't about hiding the truth or protecting misconduct. It's about making it genuinely safe for employees to speak up, so the concerns that need to surface actually do.

When people feel protected, they report more accurately and more honestly. That's more honest feedback, better outcomes, and ultimately better workplaces.

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