In this work we propose a new strategy for the authorship identification problem and we test it on an example from Romanian literature: did Radu Albala found the continuation of Mateiu Caragiale's novel "Sub pecetea tainei", or did he write himself the respective continuation? The proposed strategy is based on the similarity of rankings of function words; we compare the obtained results with the results obtained by a learning method (namely Support Vector Machines -SVM- with a string kernel).