Who do YOU write like?
There’s a new writing Internet meme floating around the web this past week or so called I Write Like. Basically, you enter a few paragraphs of text and the program analyzes it for you and tells you which famous writer you write like.
Now, I’m (admittedly) a bit of a cynic, and so I immediately set to testing the validity of this statement, wondering if it actually analyzes some aspect of your writing or if it’s a random author generator. So I started submitting snippets of my writing, mostly paragraphs from my thesis. With the first few I was told I wrote like Chuck Palahniuk, Vladimir Nabokov, Dan Brown, then Margaret Atwood. Ah yes. Clearly my writing is nothing but an elaborate hybrid of the four.
However, two of those four writers were actually on my thesis list (I’ll give you a hint, Dan Brown is not one of them, though I’ve read all four of those writers), so I thought I’d dig a little further. I resubmitted a previous chunk of text, wanting to see if I would get the same result. I did.
A few days went by, and I went back to the site. Once again submitting paragraphs from my thesis. This time I was told the same paragraph as before was actually less like Nabokov and more like Cory Doctorow, who is, according to Wikipedia, a blogger, journalist, and sci-fi writer. Quite the change considering I hadn’t edited so much as a comma out of the paragraphs. But this time, when I submitted the Nabokov/Doctorow paragraph plus the next paragraph, I got the same result. How depressing. And frustrating.
I only had one last thing to try. I went to lipsum.com and copied the first paragraph of the generated lorem ipsum text. (For those that don’t know, lorem ipsum is nonsense Latin-looking text that designers often use to dummy real text in design mockups.) This got me the result of James Joyce and was enough, at least for me, to put to bed the idea that there is any type of real analysis going on here. Especially since the results come instantaneously without any analysis time (it takes longer for me to get the weather report for my zipcode).
So what’s really going on here? Fun Internet meme that no one should really take seriously? Or something a bit more. The later, it appears. Apparently the generator is run by a business with connections to self-publishing, and when people start posting the code generated for their results all over the web, the publisher climbs higher in search engine rankings. So take a look, but don’t be sucked in by the idea that just because the Internet says you write like James Joyce that you should fork over a ton of money for a self-publishing deal.
Tags: famous authors, I write like, meme, self-publishing, writing
You and I write like each other….great minds, etc.
I have not read this Cory Doctorow. But if he somehow exists in a spectrum where half my friends write like him, plus “his” paragraphs live side by side with Nabokov’s, maybe I ought to.
What’s extra amusing is that this isn’t the first time we’ve written on the same topic the same day. Sorry for not checking your post first!
no apologies necessary….i could always check, too.
That’s an awesome combination of writers Kathryn. :-)
I recently tried out a POV tester online. You can paste in your writing to see if you’re able to write from the POV of the opposite sex. I failed misserably.
As opposed to “misterably”?
(Was that the worst pun ever?)
Er…Yes, I totally meant for that spelling mistake (misstake) to happen. Thanks for saving me Laura ;-)