A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet, not included in the present edition, was published by J.Hyde inDublin in 1721, bearing an attribution to ‘E. F’ on its title page, and was attributed to Swift when reprinted in London. Although this attribution has sometimes been credited, Davis, who printed it as an appendix, was sceptical of Swift's authorship, and pointed out that Hyde had in the previous year published The Right of Precedence between Physicians and Civilians Enquir’d into (1720), which Swift had specifically disowned on 4 April 1720 in a letter to Ford. (It could perhaps be objected that some of Curll's publications of Swift, though technically unauthorised, do in fact have considerable textual authority, as in the case of ‘A Meditation upon a Broom-stick’; but The Right of Precedence is a markedly unimpressive piece that has relatively little to suggest an association with Swift.) Ehrenpreis, far more outspoken in his views than Davis, was entirely dismissive of any attribution of the Letter to Swift.

The piece was subjected to quantitative analysis by L. T. Milic in 1967 in AQuantitative Approach to the Style of Jonathan Swift:Milic concluded, on the basis of manifest similarities, and despite some differences, that ‘the evidence permits the conclusion that Swift was the author of the Letter, though it was probably subject to the influence of another hand’, and that ‘until definite evidence comes to light about the circumstances under which A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet was written, it must therefore be accepted as Swift's work’. Further computer analysis undertaken in 2003 by John Burrows at the suggestion of Claude Rawson compared the Letter with samples including work by Addison, Budgell, Defoe, Grove, Hughes, Hume, Locke, Pope, Steele, Swift, Shaftesbury and Welsted (a selection in which writers who could not be candidates for authorship were included as surrogates for such other writers asmight be unidentified, ormight not be able to be represented by an adequate body of comparable work: the aim of the study was to test the plausibility of an attribution to Swift, rather than to identify other candidates for authorship). Results indicated a grouping of The Right of Precedence and the Letter with Swift rather than any of the other authors, but also showed a particularly strong correlation between The Right of Precedence and A Letter.