Jeff Johnson sent me a website I have not seen before. He is like a Google bot when it comes to rooting around the Web. It was featured on Holy Kow, Guy Kawasaki’s content aggregation site. The site purports to analyze your writing style and tell you what author you write like. It is exploding around the globe and, with my luck, is probably a virus that will make my computer generate some type of believable threat to Homeland Security or at the least, sign me up for a bunch of porn.
The fast-growing phenomenon is the creation of 27-year-old Russian software developer, Dmitry Chestnykh, who, ironically, speaks English as a second language. So I entered the word “Irony” 30 times and got the deceased, weird fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft.
The Huffington Post had this to say about the writing analyzer: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/17/i-write-like-website-goes_n_650037.html
It uses keyword recognition to track down your inner author. I spent about 20 minutes analyzing several of my stories. According to “I Write Like,” I write like:
- Stephen King (at least 20 times)
- David Foster Wallace (18 times)
- Kurt Vonegut (12 times)
- Ernest Hemingway (a lot)
- Mario Puzo (4 times)
- Chuck Palachniuk (twice)
- William Gibson (say what?)
I pasted in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil.” I got Ian Fleming.
The Beatles “A Day In the Life” conjured up Raymond Chandler.
Cory Doctorow came up after typing a series of repetitive profanity.
Okay, I spent more than 20 minutes doing this. I spent far too much time. But it is addictive. One hit leads to another and soon you want to analyze everything from Michael Jackson songs to the ingredients on the back of a Pop Tart box. It went on and on. Check it out: http://iwl.me
By the way, I just analyzed this blog post and it is written like Cory Doctorow. You’ll get Cory Doctorow about every 8 tries. Everyone writes like him, I guess. Perhaps his blog: http://boingboing.net is running in the background of our brainwaves as we write other stuff and it comes out about every eighth time. (this single paragraph was analyzed as writing like Cory Doctorow, so there, it’s the eighth paragraph in this post. Point proven.)
Thanks, Jeff (who also writes like Cory Doctorow). Damn. Is Dmitry Chestnykh the president of Doctorow’s fan club?
