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. Read more »