Rarely does a day goes by where I don’t sulk for at least half a minute because I can’t figure out what my writings are a cheap re-hash of. If only there was a machine that could analyze my writing and tell me which author I am most similar to. WAIT A MINUTE!
I Write Like is a free statistical analysis tool that “checks what famous writer you write like by analyzing your word choice and writing style and comparing them to those of the famous writers.”
The only information I could gather as to how it works is the little blurb above where you paste your writing. It says it analyzes word choice and writing style. Basically…don’t take it too seriously, but it is a lot of fun.
Curiously, when I ran our contributors through the algorithm it repeatedly came up with David Foster Wallace (which is a-okay by us!). This was the official breakdown after I fed one post from each contributor through the test.
David Foster Wallace- 4
Mario Puzo-1
Chuck Palahniuk-1
James Joyce-1
Dan Brown-1
Stephen King-1
Can you guess who’s who?
I’ll post the results later this week along with which piece of writing I sent through the magic writing do-hicky.
Oh, and if you’ve never read any David Foster Wallace do yourself a favor and READ THIS COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS HE GAVE TO KENYON COLLEGE! It’s so incredibly good.
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Nate Gass is currently studying to be a librarian at Dominican University. He blogs and shares music he's recorded at The Love Universe. Nate also plays guitar, mandolin, and banjo for Zach Pietrini & The Broken Bones.
I played that game, too, at least w/ my stuff. David Foster Wallace seems to come up a lot for GRTM contributors, but I noticed that when I post only one paragraph at a time, it’ll change. I ended up with quite a few authors as my writing style. Still, it is a lot of fun. I’m gonna guess that you write like Dan Brown, Stephen writes like Stephen King, just cuz it fits so nicely, Louis is Palahniuk, TBone is Joyce, and Tim is Puzo. That leaves Colin, Josh and Ryan as Foster Wallaces. Oops, guess I just gave mine away, too.
I put the first chapter of a novel I started working on a while back through the analyzer and got for chapter 1: Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin, and David Foster Wallace. Although I have to say, I think this thing is phony.
It’s a pretty ridiculous tool.
But it is consistent, so its not completely random. I put each post through at least twice and they came up with the same author each time.
With that said I have no clue how it works, I think it looks at form and length in addition to word choice. Which would explain why a site consisting of blogs and essays would compare to David Foster Wallace, since most of his famous writings were non-fiction essays.