Wednesday, July 21, 2010

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 !)

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!


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:

Juliana said...

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

Steve Bodio said...

I got Nabokov-- for a section of my dog book- in- progress! Well, it does mention Russia...

Peculiar said...

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.

Odious said...

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.

Peculiar said...

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."

Moro Rogers said...

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.)