Modern Communication’s Big Open Secret

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET on April 15, 2021.

In the late-19th-century play Cyrano de Bergerac, the eloquent title character gets a woman to fall deeply in love with another man by ghostwriting letters, as him, to her. The details are a bit messy—Cyrano himself is also in love with the woman, the woman is his cousin, and the other guy dies in Act IV—but much of the play’s drama revolves around the letters’ secret authorship.

One hundred–plus years later, in the age of texting and emailing, the world is full of Cyranos: Getting quick, surreptitious help writing high-stakes messages has never been easier, whether that means enlisting friends to consult on a flirty note in a dating app or turning to a co-worker for assistance on a sensitive email to your boss. Although this sort of collaboration is widespread, people still generally assume that the messages they receive were composed by the sender alone. Acknowledging how many of our supposedly one-on-one communications are written by committee would risk