I write like… July 16, 2010 Jill Well this is a fun little tool. I put in a variety of different blog posts, and it turns out that I always write like David Foster Wallace. I suppose I do love irony and extremely long sentences, so, I’ll take it.
I saw this at Shakesville yesterday. I write like DFW, too. Or Dan Brown. Or Stephen King. Or James Joyce. (And all in the same story.) Allegedly, the algorithm picks up on keywords rather than writing style. Oh yeah, and this from the comments: ” his list of authors consists of 37 white men and 3 white women.” So basically it’s which white guy I write like, sort of.
I got Chuck Palahinuk when I tried it; I guess I’m less wordy & use more sentence fragments than I thought.
I got Stephen King and then James Joyce. I think I write more like myself and less like them, but it is a fun tool.
I write like DFW too. It’s that machine’s favourite option or a LOT of bloggers really hate full stops.
Most of mine were also DFW (including a portion of my masters thesis), but when I put in a post about a Catholic topic (clergy sex abuse), I got Dan Brown (so not fair!). I also got Margaret Atwood and James Joyce.
I got David Foster Wallace a couple of times, but the first time I got Isaac Asimov so I’m sticking with him. Kathy — good point from the Shakesville comments. I’m not going to suggest that all white guys write the same, that would be silly, but incorporating some authors who are NOT white guys would give more range. Besides not, you know, erasing all authors who are not white guys (or three white women).
I wish this meme would stop going around, since the author seems to be specifically excluding authors of color.
The entire purpose of this widget is to create a googlebomb that boosts a company’s Google ranking. Notice the “Mac journal software” link in the results? That points to a company’s website for software you can write journals with a Mac. By posting this on their blogs (which thankfully you didn’t), bloggers unwittingly make this software’s google rank increase, in the same way back in the Bush years people used the word “failure” to link to the White House, making whitehouse.gov the #1 result when you searched for failure. Boosting a google ranking is the entire point of this, it’s likely it’s not analyzing anything and is just spitting out a random author each time.
WHA? John Cain you are blowing my mind. That is such a good thing to know. Can I repost your comment on my blog? And yeah, Rachel, the list is depressingly un-diverse.
I don’t think it’s spitting out a random sample as I got Nabokov 5 times in a row using different source material, but I have no quibble with the other points. I had wondered how many authors were on the list of possibles. It’s disheartening to hear the truth.
Yes, I meant to qualify that. And even if it is a googlebomb, they still could have made the list of authors more inclusive.
As a web developer, I recognized the “googlebomb” right away but I thought I’d test it anyway to see if it has any merit at all. I kept coming up with the same two names. Just to be sure it wasn’t spitting out random names, I ran the same 5 paragraphs through it 10 times. Got the same author every time so it is doing something, I guess.
I got DFW too. For fun I pasted in bits from Linda Alcoff’s The Problem of Speaking for Others (she’s DFW as well) and Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Apparently Rich writes like Isaac Asimov.
I gave it a text in rather non-fluent German just to see what it would do with non-English. Somewhat to my surprise, I got Kurt Vonnegut not James Joyce (I was expecting Joyce as I expected the program to read the unfamiliar words as Joyce-esque nonsense.) Not sure where Vonnegut came from.
I tried several stories and novels I’d written and got the following comparisons: Dan Brown DFW Stephen King Margaret Atwood J. J. Tolkien Mary Shelley I’m all over the place, although I do write in various genres.
It could easily have a predictive algorithm, just not a meaningfully predictive algorithm. Which, you know, internet meme and all, not a surprise. The author’s douchey “colourblind” attitude (re Rachel’s links @ 9) is equally unsurprising, but annoying. Other option: DIY version!
@mh: Go right ahead. @Jadey: I think you’re right. It could be putting out a result based off word count for all we know. One would hope that if an algorithm that performed accurate literary analysis existed, it would be put to better use than a free web widget.
Evidently in my blog, I write like Kurt Vonegut, but for work (e.g. scientific papers), I write like Douglas Adams.
I tried it too and came up with Ian Fleming and DFW. It’s nice to know there are at least a couple of women in the list bur 90 percent male seems like overkill.
H.P. Lovecraft is mine. I am a writer of “weird fiction.” Considering, I’m mostly memoir and personal essay, I guess that means my LIFE could be considered the mix horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Come to think of it, “weird fiction” is the perfect description of my life. Thanks, Jill!
One would hope that if an algorithm that performed accurate literary analysis existed, it would be put to better use than a free web widget. There’s an entire field called computational linguistics devoted to getting computers to analyse language. It would be very easy to put together a widget to do this, even one that uses quite sophisticated techniques, because there’s so much work that has already been done in this area. Probably the widget is looking at preferred grammatical constructions and other stylistic tics as well as keywords. That wouldn’t be hard to do. Though despite all the work that has been done in computational linguistics, it turns out that computers aren’t really very good at analysing language (see Google translate for example) because they don’t understand it. No one should be surprised if this widget gives them silly results!
After I saw that someone got Margaret Atwood I kept scanning posts from my blog hoping to get her but apparently it was not meant to be, more is the pity
I put my last post that was reasonably long (http://bradmillershero.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-i-support-burka-ban.html) It said I wrote like Dan Brown. This makes me sad. I’m going to try again until I get someone I like. Anyways, all awesome people are white and male, no surprise there, eh? Back to lurking…
I did this a couple days ago with one of my more recent blog posts that I thought was one of my better pieces, style-wise, and also got David Foster Wallace. I didn’t know who he was, but after posting it on Facebook and hearing about how funny his writing is, I’m planning to check it out. After reading this post, I was curious whether or not putting in other pieces that I personally thought were a wildly different style, if I’d get a different answer, but nope, it’s DFW all the way. That’s a pretty fun meme!
A friend of mine on dreamwidth signal boosed this to her DW account: Jim McDonald did some digging into that “I Write Like” meme, and what he found isn’t pretty. “I looked at the rest of the text on the results page: Great job! Do you want to get your book published? “I have personally read through thousands of book proposals in my career as a publisher and agent. I know what these professionals are looking for—and what they are not looking for.” — Michael Hyatt, Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. That little bit includes two links, both to the same page: [http colon double slash]michaelhyatt[dot]com/products/ebook-writing-a-winning-book-proposal Yep, it’s SEO. And they’re using social engineering to get those links wide-spread and high in the Google stats. Helpful little cut-n-paste code to put in your blog! But wait! There’s more! Go over to that advertised page, and you’ll find a pair of $19.97 e-books by the above-said and afore-mentioned Michael Hyatt. These books promise to tell you such insider secrets as how to avoid the three items you should NEVER include in a fiction book proposal. Wow, I can’t wait to find out. So, who’s Michael Hyatt, and what is Thomas Nelson? Basically, a former legitimate Christian publisher, now a vanity press. This “I Write Like” site isn’t remotely legitimate. No, they aren’t trying; or, anyway, they aren’t trying to analyze writing samples: They’re trying to lure newbie authors to the rocks and shoals of vanity publication. I will also note that there’s a “sign up for our awesome newsletter!” box on the side, which says that by doing so you can download FREE a “classic” book on writing by Charles Raymond Barrett — a book which is, it *doesn’t* tell you, also available at Project Gutenberg because it’s from 1898. I *strongly* recommend removing any links and code from “I Write Like” that may be in your posts.” I say we not give these scumbags any more linkage than they already have and remove the extant links from our sites immediately.
I pasted a few paragraphs from a trade-mag piece about inspection/detection systems on packaging lines, and it came back Arthur Conan Doyle. Attackfish is right. This is a bunch of crap.
I think it’s a googlebomb for David Foster Wallace, because he came up pretty consistently for me (along with Dan Brown, oh noes!) and for most of the other folks who tried this at my blog. Even my reader who tried out his carbon-capture technical writing came up as DFW. My 10-year-old’s book report came up as Shakespeare, however – and another of his fourth-grade essays came up as Atwood. Aargh! As a far of hers since 1985, I was dismayed until I read that even Atwood didn’t come up as Atwood, but as Stephen King … Yeah, it’s crap. But it’s fun.
Well, I wrote something condemning Twilight, and it said I write like Stephenie Meyer. It also said I write like Dan Brown, and like James Joyce. This looks like one of those “Who were you in your past life” webpages than something scientific.
I put in text that I wrote as technical descriptions at work. Not sure if that will skew the results considering it’s filled with jargon and nonsense. I just realized how depressingly little non-work prose I’ve written lately. At first I was getting all different people, but then a clear pattern emerged: 1st: David Foster Wallace 2nd: Margaret Atwood 3rd: Raymond Chandler 4th: Dan Brown (dear god, no) 5th: David Foster Wallace 6th: David Foster Wallace 7th: David Foster Wallace 8th: David Foster Wallace 9th: David Foster Wallace 10th: David Foster Wallace 11th: David Foster Wallace 12th: David Foster Wallace
I put in excerpts from my dissertation and got a different result each time: 1. Jonathan Swift 2. James Fenimore Cooper 3. H.P. Lovecraft 4. George Orwell Sometimes one or two paragraphs made a difference; the excerpts that produced the James Fenimore Cooper result and the H.P. Lovecraft result were taken from the same chapter. One excerpt was slightly longer than then other. Fun to see my writing linked to the names of famous authors, but I don’t trust the analysis one bit.
Being the good little Joycean nerd that I am, I ran a few tests on this toy. It correctly identified The Sisters (as it appears in Dubliners) and a fairly substantial passage from Finnegans Wake as the work of Joyce. However, it attributed the 1904 version of The Sisters, which appeared in The Irish Homestead to Dickens.