The L.A. Times book blog, Jacket Copy, had a fun item yesterday afternoon about a new website called I Write Like. Just pop in a paragraph or two of your own text (no tweets, please), and your copy will be run through a database and compared to that of famous writers.
Sounds like fun, right? It is. I’m thinking it’s not very accurate, though. I have a blunt, conversational writing style that never changes much, whether I’m writing an email, a review, or a blog entry, yet every single example I put in came up with a different comparison. When I inserted a review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the site said I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. A piece lamenting the publication of bad book sequels? Stephen King. And a review of Kitty Kelley’s Oprah biography apparently recalls none other than Vladmir Nabokov.
Go ahead, try it. Who do you write like? (P.S. This blog entry=Nabokov again!)
It’s fun, but useless. I got a different author every single time I used it (sadly I never got Stephen King). My low point was seeing Dan Brown’s name, but the high point was seeing Nabokov and Vonnegut. One thing I found funny: I put in an old review of a Chuck Palahniuk book. When Palahniuk’s name appeared in the text, it told me I wrote like Palahniuk. If I removed his name and changed it to something else (in this case “Paul”) it said I wrote like Margaret Atwood. So clearly the results are completely random.
I used two (very old) term papers. I got H.P. Lovecraft and James Joyce.
Kind of a fun site.
This seems more random than useful. I got: Chuck Palahniuk, Stephen King, James Joyce, Dan Brown.
Got Stephen King every time. Which was almost demoralizing until one remembers how much he sells. I’m down with it now.
I write like James Joyce.
And Hemingway and Stephen King.
It’s 100% random. I pasted in Mel Gibson’s rant, and it came back as Margaret Atwood.
Ok, that’s hilarious.
I wonder what Lohan’s courtroom scrawl would produce.
I entered a paragraph from Stephen King’s Under the Dome – guess what? Stephen King writes like Stephen King!! so maybe its not completely random then.
Someone needs to put in a passage from Primary Colors and see what comes back.
Two different chapters from my college thesis both came back as Dan Brown, so it’s not completely random, I guess. But a grad school philosophy paper on Hegel was Lovecraft and another on Francis Bacon was Nabokov. So I can’t tell if they have some sort of algorithm to make their determination, but they certainly only have a limited selection of authors to use as comparisons.
It seems like they only have a few authors.
mine said “Bram Stoker”, i wrote something about solitude, i don’t get it, but it was fun.
Anantara. In ancient Sanskrit, it means boundless water. The word sits marvelously on the tongue, like a spot of honey, much like the old Greek word, Thalassa, meaning the sea.
Water is everywhere at the Anantara Garden Spa in Hua Hin, a seaside resort area about 220 km south of Bangkok on the Gulf of Siam. You see it in the intense blue waters that fringe its white sandy beaches and in the free-flowing, lily-filled lagoons winding around the spa like a protective moat.
I got Vonnegut. I’d be honored, but I think it’s just a lack of adjectives.
I plugged in a few paragraphs from Handmaid’s Tale and got Iassac Asimov…
Haha I got William Shakespeare