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I Am Kurt Vonnegut
D.C. McAllister asked yesterday, “What Author Do You Wish You Could Write Like?”.
A few months ago, I discovered an online writing style analyzer. (http://iwl.me/) You enter some text and it compares the sentence structure, grammar and other writing characteristics against its database, and – voila! – it tells you which author’s style it most closely resembles.
This is gonna be great, I tell myself. I’m gonna find out that I possess the pen of Virgil!
So I pull a few of my blog posts out of mothballs and get ready to cut and paste.
First up, an old post in which I defend the Millenials.
Select All. Copy. Paste. Analyze. Wait.
“You write like Dan Brown.”
Dan Brown? The Da Vinci Code guy? Seriously? Certainly I write better than some pop-culture novelist! I shouldn’t be so disappointed though. It’s better than being told I write like John Grisham.
No worries, I say to myself, I have plenty more material to draw from.
So I pull another post, this time about an early morning visit from some missionaries. It’s a masterpiece!
Copy. Paste. Analyze. Wait.
Shoot.
Dan Brown again. What’s the problem…a conspiratorial tone?!?
This can’t continue.
Next up is something about exercising one’s faith in the public square.
“You write like H.P. Lovecraft.”
Hey, I read this guy in high school. He wrote creepy stories, a modern-day Edgar Allan Poe. But what does that say about me?!?
Not many posts left. I’m starting to sweat. I’m not even close to Virgil.
I select a reflection about the difference a year makes.
Ctrl-C. Ctrl-V. Analyze. Wait.
“You write like James Joyce.”
James Joyce was someone I was supposed to have read in high school but didn’t. That’s progress! But was he a poet or a novelist? I can’t remember. Regardless, there’s something profoundly philosophical about a drunken Irishman. Any drunken Irishman.
Last one…I’m going all in. A reflection of a day-trip to London.
You know all the points and clicks by now.
Wait. Wait. Wait.
Jackpot.
I’m cashin’ in and goin’ home.
“You write like Kurt Vonnegut.”
Published in General
I got Robert Louis Stevenson. Cool!
Wait. Now I write like Douglas Adams for a different writing sample. And when I pasted both sample A (Stevenson) and sample B (Adams), and ran the analyzer on both at once, Adams won out.
Oh my; I’ve always been a fan of Kilgore Trout. :)
Yeah, I’m not sure about its statistical veracity, but I’ve tested it on a good amount of content and consistently get the same 3-4 results.
I received H.P. Lovecraft. Who knows, but being a techno-nerd its likely not out of the question.
I’ve gotten Jane Austen, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, or any number of other writers when I’ve pasted a particular work in.
If you paste a wide variety of genres of your own writing in (say, both your poetry and your prose), you’re fairly likely to get HP Lovecraft.
It is essentially rubbish at identifying poetry, or any writing that contains poetry. I just pasted in an e e cummings poem, and it mistook it for JRR Tolkien.
So maybe I do write like Virgil. Happy day!
Once you get that Ice-nine chemistry sorted out give me a heads up. Not a prepper in general but this time…
It just misidentified the following passage from this post as being “like Shakespeare”:
I assure you, Shakespeare it is not.
Apparently I’m some Frankenstein mash-up of L. Frank Baum, P.G. Wodehouse, Ursula K. Leguin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Dan Brown, and (ugh) J.D. Salinger.
Kneel before my literary prowess!
Write? Heck I can barely read. But I’ve lived like Hunter Thompson and Ernest Hemingway.
Using my one multi-paragraph post that survived the migration to 2.0, I got David Foster Wallace–whom I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read.
Thanks for posting this, Dave. It’s a lot of fun.
I’ve never particularly enjoyed writing until I started playing around on Ricochet, and other than Ricochet posts I don’t have any material to submit for analysis. So I submitted seven recent posts.
The names Stephen King, Jonathan Swift, and James Joyce glared back at me on my first three submittals. Right. Is this thing serious? Well, first, my “writing” is all over the map, so I can understand how analysis would reflect that by serving up random authors; and second, I can understand the tactic of sucking up to a potential customer by listing names of great authors whose names even I would recognize.
But, three out of the next four submittals returned the author H.P. Lovecraft, who I was not familiar with until google told me that he was an early 20th century “horror” writer.
I suppose the computer is either confusing “horror” for “horrible,” or it is gently hinting at a more accurate assessment of my writing skills.
Either way, I get it. And I will not be subscribing to their “awesome free newsletter.”
OK, I admit it, the thingy said Iron Mike Tyson. I tried another post and it said Stephanie Meyer.
I chucked in some writing and got told I write like Chuck Palahniuk, whom I looked up and discovered wrote Fight Club. Apparently the first rule about my writing is don’t talk about my writing.
William Gibson? Who is that? (I write like…)
From three different posts, three different answers:
David Foster Wallace, Mario Puzo, and Arthur C. Clarke.
However, when I combined those three posts together, I got:
David Foster Wallace (when in order above 1, 2, 3)
H.P. Lovecraft (ordered 2, 3, 1)
H.P. Lovecraft (ordered 3, 2, 1)
I ran three chunks of writing through the analyzer and got Wallace all three times. I can’t say I’ve ever read anything by him either.
I write like Ursula K. LeGuin. Not too bad, really. I’ve liked a lot of her work. I can dig it.
Now I’ve gotta find something I’ve written that’s actually an original piece and not simply a cut-and-paste mashup.
I think the last really original think I’ve written is on an old Mac Classic gathering dust in a basement somewhere.
My post on the decline and fall of the banana was apparently written by Cory Doctorow. So was my most recent post on music – unless it was written by David Foster Wallace or Shakespeare (IWL coudn’t seem to make up its mind about that). If I post on SSM and homosocksuality, I apparently write like William Gibson.
I find it rather fitting that when I write about music composed by Gesualdo, I write like James Joyce. (Too bad Rico 2.0 ate my post on this.)
In other news, Dan Brown apparently can’t speak French. At least, that is my only explanation for IWL attributing this post to him.
I tried it using three different semi-original blog posts. I got three different results: Harry Harrison, James Joyce, and H.P. Lovecraft.
I question the methodology.
I threw in a bunch of random text from a personal blog, and got different results each time:
So, apparently, I write like Sybil (or Eve, as in “three faces of”).
Has anybody tried testing the system by entering works by famous artists?
If it is unable to correctly identify a particular famous author …
The issues I see here is that everybody is feeding the machine blog type posts and not stories. All of the authors programmed into the machine thing are novelists not essayists. Last I checked there is not a lot of dialog or scene descriptions in blog posts.
I did, and it didn’t.
To be fair, though, I was testing whether it could reliably attribute famous poetry. It can’t.
I pasted this Wodehouse quote in:
I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.
And, apparently, he writes like George Orwell.
I entered The Velvet Glove by Harry Harrison.
The site said it was written like Cory Doctorow.