Well, I feel special (or they have just added new authors to their random asskiss generator), I got Cory Doctorow and Vladimir Nabukov…
Well, I felt special right up until I saw there was a page 2…
Another Cory Doctorow here.
The prologue of my doctoral dissertation returned David Foster Wallace as a match.
But the abstract, which is exactly the same concept but a little more detailed, returned James Joyce. And the fifth chapter returned a match of H. G. Wells.
I’m thinking “random choice.” The fifth chapter is 13,565 words long. “I Write Like” sent back a match in under a second. Yeah, I doubt that was a serious analysis. It was barely enough time to count the words and sentences.
I doubt that it’s random, but I also think that it’s not a very in-depth analysis. Counting up the occurences of one thousand common words and a hundred common phrases in your entry and comparing the frequencies against profiles of 30-50 writers in their database could be done quite quickly, I would think. It explains some of the dramatic shifts that many of us have been noticing.
It’s a legitimate comparison of similarity between works of writing on some level, but I doubt that it’s any real indication of ‘style.’
I’ll paste a few from the classic “If LOTR Had Been Written By Someone Else” thread.
Fingolfin’s Hemingway = J.K. Rowling
Fingolfin’s Mark Twain = Mark Twain
Fingolfin’s Ray Bradbury = Ray Bradbury
Fingolfin’s Tom Wolfe = J.R.R Tolkien (never heard of this Tolkien guy)
Gonzoron’s Dr Suess = Stephan King
That’s hilarious by the way. Stephan King has said children’s stories are actually quite horrifying.
Sebhal’s John Milton = Stephan King
Hoops’ Stephan King = Stephan King
Vindy-Poo’s Shakespeare = Stephan King WTF?
I write short articles for a site called Textbroker. I submitted three paragraphs from an article I wrote about Border collies and it said I write like Bram Stroker.
I then submitted three paragraphs from an article I wrote about floor waxing and buffing and it said I write like Vladimir Nabukov.
Evidently Charles Bukowski writes like Cory Doctorow.
As if