Here's an amusing toy: I Write Like. Drop a few paragraphs of your text in there, and it claims to analyze it and tell you what author matches your style. Of course, I seldom write like anything at all these days, but that's beside the point. My old Illinois River piece yielded up David Foster Wallace (doesn't mean much to me); my more recent discussion of tamarisk beetles gave Nabokov (thanks, but I don't think so); but my Gila River trip report yielded what is surely the correct answer (Iä ! Iä !)
The first five paragraphs of Call of Cthulhu gets you Arthur C. Clark. A few more paragraphs got us there, but "cyclopean" was a dead giveaway.
Via Atomic Nerds (sorry about the Atwood).
6 comments:
Tried it - and am wondering if they had any female authors in their database. Or perhaps I write in a male style?
http://pensievereflections.blogspot.com/2010/07/really.html
I got Nabokov-- for a section of my dog book- in- progress! Well, it does mention Russia...
I just fed it a few pages of Emma, and it did produce the right answer. A couple paragraphs of Northanger Abbey gave back Joyce.
Immediately after posting that, I realized that, yes, that was a reasonably King-like comment. Am hearby commited to working in "phocine" and "soi-disant" into every post hereafter.
It occurred to me that one could make an amusing game (among incorrigible nerds, needless to say) out of extemporizing text with the goal of triggering a specific author. My afternoon's attempt at Wodehouse kept yielding Joyce.
Odious, if "soi-disant" doesn't work, there's always "squamous."
Mine said I wrote like Cory Doctorow. Dunno who that is (but I guess I don't have to bother with him since I already know what his writing is like.)
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