According to I Write Like, apparently I write like Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, James Joyce, Agatha Christie, H.P. Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ian Fleming. There could be more, for all I know. Apparently I’m not that consistent.
The only consistent elements of this on a post-to-post basis are the following:
1.) Three Executives posts are all Agatha Christie. Which is eerie, because I’m pretty sure Agatha Christie never had a character who tried to eat gravel.
2.) Conversations with Flapjacks are always James Joyce. Which is eerier and a little freaky, to be honest.
3.) Stuff I write for Torontoist in “journalism mode” is Vonnegut. Which is the only element of the whole experiment I find flattering.
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I get Stephen King, Dan Brown, and J.D. Salinger when I put in random blog posts of mine. Um.
Oh man that’s awesome.
Apparently I’m a dead ringer for Raymond Chandler, which might just have made my week.
I get mostly Douglas Adams from my blog posts, though with one H. P. Lovecraft bit for no good reason (it was the opening paragraph of my review of MATINEE).
From a prose thing, I get Adams, Ian Fleming, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Blog posts get Ian Flemming, one novel gets Stephen King/Douglas Adams, and the other novel where I’m aping Raymond Chandler gets, unsurprisingly, Raymond Chandler. And yet everyone who reads my work compares it to George Orwell. Go figure.
I’d kind of love to know how the mechanics work on this program. Their description is pretty vague, but it’s an interesting idea though.
I got Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood, and James Joyce.
Did an experiment and the site confused Asimov with Carroll, but confirmed Wells as Wells.
A random sampling of 6 blog posts got me two Asimovs, two Dan Browns, and two Douglas Adams. So, 2/3 good results.
The two short stories I had easy access to online got me a Raymond Chandler and a J.D. Salinger.
It seems that everyone gets Dan Brown. Their algorithm doesn’t seem to be very stable.
@cyd: or that they’ve accurately depicted Dan Brown’s writing as having no discernible style whatsoever.
I got Dan Brown too (off a recent guest blog post), glad I wasn’t the only one.
My most recent diary entries got me Margaret Atwood and Chuck Palahniuk. And an angry email to an ex-boyfriend got J.D. Salinger.
I like this game.
I think it looks at vocabulary more than anything. I found that a post that mentions “dwarves” was called for Tolkien, one about goblins for Rowling. The first was actually some thoughts on racism in fantasy, and the second a short story wherein a man ends up writing in his own blood about horrible obscenities.
Apparently one half of DFW’s “This is Water” is like Margaret Atwood (which I never read), while the other half is like Chuck Palahniuk (which is really not DFWesq writer); And while I can accept that my attempts at Fiction are as bad as Dan Brown they are bad at a different style… this is another case of “nice idea, bad execution” (and I’m not really sure how do you execute something like that, do they count the words and look for the most common ones and see what other author uses them? if I use “Eldritch” do I automatically get H.P Lovecraft? Also an analysis I did of H.P Lovecraft goy “you are H.P Lovecraft which makes little sense. This all think is like something out of “If on A Winter Night a Traveler”)
This post was, apparently, written in the style of James Joyce.
I fed some entries from my two blogs in there and got mostly Stephen King. There was also some Palahniuk, a couple of Dan Browns, and single appearances for Asimov, Joyce, Nabokov, Fleming, and Vonnegut.
I don’t know what to make of it.
Comic reviews got me Lovecraft, ranting about the state of TNA Wrestling got me King. Make of that what you will.
I keep on getting James Joyce. Considering it’s a blog on the television show “Cheaters,” I might need an editor or six.
I put in a bunch of my short stories. I got James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladmir Nobokov, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Douglas Adams.
But an overwhelming majority of Dan Brown.
Which proves that when the Scottish Lodge was talking about the Golden Dawn, they were really discussing the financial situation in Franch….
I’m a little offended here. No matter what text I feed it (be it a lengthy message board post, an old email, or a short story) I get Stephen King*. Stephen King is boring! Why couldn’t I have been Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Gaiman, Vonnegut, Christopher Moore, or some other writer that I actually like?
Well, that’s enough posting for me. I have to get back to writing my novel about a murderous toaster.
*Except for that one story where I got Lovecraft (I’m a little creeped out now) and the essay that reads like Dan Brown (whoever that is).
Ha! That last post got me a Vonnegut! I win!
First I got Douglas Adams, and was happy.
Then I got Dan Brown, and was sad.
Wait, wait — how much of the Dan Brown’s stuff contains any kind of Christian motif? Because I think that’s what setting it off.
Also, one of my friend’s old self-insert Dragonball Z fanfics got an “Oscar Wilde”, so fuck this shit.
Okay, the Wikipedia article on the Vatican got Dan Brown.
The article on the Penis got Chuck Palahniuk.
HOLY SHIT! I took the single piece of fanfic I’d put in my LiveJournal, copied it in there, and it said I wrote like Kurt Vonnegut!
I didn’t think there’d be a resemblance, but I guess the site did. If it’s true, that’s very cool.
“…ranting about the state of TNA Wrestling got me King.”
Going with the obvious joke: it has gotten pretty horrific…
Pasting the entirety of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” got me…
Vladimir Nabokov!
I put in one of my short stories and I got “a guy who will never be paid for his writing.”
HP Lovecraft here, which makes sense as I threw in a fairly dense article.
Time to have fun dumping Project Gutenberg texts in to find out if the program can recognise them! So far, it turns out Jules Verne wrote exactly like Dan Brown…
Put in a bunch of short stories and two chapters from a novel I started not long ago. Happy that both novel chapters got the same result – yay, consistency! – and that result was Vonnegut.
Short stories got Joyce, Palahniuk, P.G. Wodehouse – hell yes! – and H.P. Lovecraft. Except the horror story was Wodehouse and the breakup story was Lovecraft.
The Palahniuk story was largely about a medical condition, though, so there’s at least some logic here. I think vocabulary’s probably a big part.
Based on my blog entry I write like Kurt Vonnegut (dammit I was aiming for Hemingway!)
My short story “Banging the Pipes” has me writing like… DAN BROWN?! (cough gag wheeze) Oh GOD NO! NOOOOOOOO…
After the horrifying discovery that my earliest short story had me writing like Dan Brown, I grabbed my later more mature work “Snipe Hunt” and sample the first 2 pages. THAT short story has me writing like Stephen King. Whew…
Stephen King writes just like Stephen King. Go figure.
My deliberate H.P. Lovecraft pastiche reads liek Jack London, while my idea for making a fake Lord Of The Rings trailer reads like Lovecraft. Huh.
Shoot.
Got Dan Brown for an article.
On the upside?
My attempt at a PG Wodehouse pastiche got Wodehouse. So, that’s very nice.
I think “Dan Brown” is the site’s way of saying “I don’t know”. It kept popping up a lot when I was messing around with it.
Other fun results (these were reported to me, I didn’t get them firsthand):
-Random quotes from Twilight: James Joyce
-The first chapter of My Immortal: James Joyce
-Chapters 2-4 of My Immortal in one block: J.K. Rowling
-The word “butts” over and over again: William Shakespeare
Margaret Atwood. Should I be concerned?
@DF, you plugged My Immortal into the mix? You crazy bastard, I’m surprised the website survived…
My Vonnegut thesis spat back Vonnegut at me. Thank God.
Apparently my blog style is Lovecraftian, which… no.
And the last good short story I wrote is apparently Palahniuk. I’ll take it. (I thought I was aping Hemingway, though.)
I entered some Stephenie Meyer text in for a lark and just got a blank page, regardless of how many times I tried to refresh the page or run it again. I… I think I broke it.
Posted my history paper on World War One propaganda and got Lovercraft. Ummm weird. Just plain weird.
A terrible thought occurred to me. What if the site can tell you that you write like Ayn Rand?
So I Googled an excerpt from “The Fountainhead” and copied it in there.
Good news: Ayn Rand’s name did not pop up.
Bad news for Chuck Palahniuk: this site says that Ayn Rand wrote like you.
Okay so, from a random sample of 12 works i got:
3 Margaret Woods
2 H.P. Lovecraft
2 James Joyce
1 James Fenimore Cooper
1 Douglas Adams
1 Jack London
1 Kurt Vonnegut
1 Edgar Allan Poe
So the consensus seems to be that i write like a girl.
I just had an idea! Let’s feed it Shakespeare and find out once and for all who really wrote those plays.
What? It doesn’t work that way?
It would seem James Joyce wrote Hamlet. It does not surprise me in the least that James Joyce was a time traveller, as Finnegan’s Wake makes perfect sense once you realize that it’s written in 31st-century Shelta.
The grand majority of my blog posts get David Foster Wallace, which is interesting to me in that no one else in this comment thread seems to have gotten him. I’ve got the occasional James Joyce and a short story I wrote in (what I thought was) the style of Lovecraft got Raymond Chandler. I got Dan Brown on two things I checked, one which was legitimately strange (a liveblog of the Oscars) and the other was a scholarly paper on Hitchcock’s Rear Window (which surprised me).
The Nigerian scam e-mail I got today is written in the style of David Foster Wallace. I dunno what that says about you, Mark.