This morning a friend sent me a link to a site called “I Write Like.” It has an “analyzer” that looks at a few paragraphs of your writing and spits out the name of an author with the same writing style. Fun, but likely not very scientific.
I don’t have a nice long novel in progress that might exhibit a consistent style throughout. All I have to draw on is this blog, which is all over the map on subject matter and most likely on style, too. Sure enough, from 12 random posts written over the last 6 months or so, I got these results:
David Foster Wallace 4
Stephen King 2
Dan Brown 2
Arthur Conan Doyle 1
Margaret Atwood 1
Arthur C. Clarke 1
Raymond Chandler 1
Doesn’t surprise me that the Pied Typer is exactly that — mixed up. But at least I’m consistently inconsistent.
That’s so funny! Based on the complaints I get from the the built-in WP text checker, I must be a terrible writer. But I bookmarked that link for later, when I can think of something to try it out on. 😀
Don’t let the WP checker intimidate you. It’s wrong or ill-informed or incomplete so often that I stopped using it. (Admittedly, as a former editor, I’m rather opinionated about things like that.)
I typed in: “It was a Dark and stormy night.” And it told me I write like Ursula K. Le Guin.
You, sir, are not showing proper respect for the process. 😉
I tried it with my normal writing (non-blogging) and got Clark and Vonnegut.
Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Sounds like you.
Yes I’ve seen this doing the rounds and I got David Foster Wallace too, as did many, many others!
I’ve wondered if this isn’t some sort of set-up to publicize DFW. Or maybe his style was so ill-defined that everyone matches some aspect of it.
I think it’s that Wallace wrote how many bloggers write and bloggers are using samples from their blogs. Just a hunch.
Hmm. What does it say about Wallace that his writing is similar to the work of many bloggers? (Not familiar with his work myself.) Bloggers, of course, can take heart in knowing their work is similar to that of a published writer.
Again, it would be interesting to know what the analyzer considers and compares. Vocabulary? Sentence length and structure? Subject matter?