Monday 26 July 2010

I Write Like...



While mucking around with the internet yesterday, I stumbled on this little engine. It's called "I Write Like..." and it claims to be able to use a sample of your own work and, by the magic of modern electronics, analyse it and then say whether your style is similar to a famous author - or not, presumably: who you "write like" in other words.

Apparently, after extensive testing with different blog posts, I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Good grief!

I'd never really understood exactly what people meant when they described this blog as a horror story. I thought they were just being rude. But thanks to "I Write Like..." dot com, I now know it's because I write like the father of the grizzly modern horror genre. So there you go.

If you're a blogger or just curious about your general writing style, then give it a try. You might find you're (yet) another H.P. Lovecraft. Or possibly even worse.

7 comments:

  1. Hey, brilliant. I'll try that. I suspect Enid Blyton may be my lot!!

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  2. Well.... I tried 3 times with different pieces of my text. It seems my style is eclectic, for I got three different answers.

    First time it was Kurt Vonnegut (good...satire, black comedy... ok, that's not bad), the second it was Cory Doctorow (science fiction?), and the third, yes the third, wait for it......

    Was James Joyce....wow...... woww....
    triple wow. Result!

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  3. I tried it a week or so ago, and was told I write like Charles Dickens. Well, I have had both the best of years and the worst of years so far...

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  4. Lol @ tris and John.

    I'm still trying to get over the HP Lovecraft slur made by that thing. I admit it is more than a possibility that I rely far too heavily, or perhaps can't stop myself from using, the unnecessary, though sometimes quite witty, non-defining relative clause. Lovecraft was himself, so I am told, a purveyor of fine subordinate clauses, which are not entirely unrelated devices, whenever he couldn't think of a way to end a sentence, or to get a grip on his archaic purple prose, or tame the literary power of the necronomicon, his only good idea, or his irritating tendency to spell words according to which particular prejudice was in control of his damaged imagination on any given writing day. The man was pretty much a nuisance.

    I'm therefore damn ashamed that, deservedly, John got Dickens, tris got Joyce - and I got him.

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  5. It appears to have sussed me out as Mario Puzo, D. ;-)

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  6. That seems about right to me, Don Spiderleone!

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  7. tris, that's very interesting. I tried with three different posts from my own blog and got THE SAME THREE RESULTS AS YOU, in the samer order. Methinks "I write like" may not be all its cracked up to be!

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Any thoughts?