Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Where do you fit? As a writer.

 

Are you Louisa May Alcott?  Stephen King? Or is your style more like James Fennimore Cooper?

Well, now you can figure that out!  Or you can figure it out within the confines of some programmed algorithm at the link below.  It checks all those things a computer can compare like word choice, writing style, variation of sentence length, etc.

http://iwl.me/

Go there.  Cut-and-paste samples of your writing.  Click the button.  GET AN ANSWER!

Me?  Apparently I’m David Foster Wallace.  I tried my blog entries.  Entire chapters of books.  Short stories.  I left.  Came back in a different browser.  Cleared my cache. Tried it more times.

Oh, once I did get James Fennimore Cooper.  But over and over I got David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace?  (Infinite Jest, acknowledged as outrageously and brilliantly talented, called the “best mind of his generation,” and committed suicide in 2008)  Why did I try this so many times?  David Foster Wallace?  Seriously?  Me?  Well, okay then.

I think this tool is absolutely correct.  Yes.  I do.    Okay, fine.  Maybe it only has two answers.

You go find out.  If you’re not a professional writer, go paste your long emails in or you blogs.

9 comments:

Michele Hauf said...

Supposedly I write like James Joyce. Never read Joyce. Huh.

Debra Dixon said...

Michele-- Ha! There's a heavy hitter for you!

You poetical girl, you.

It's very interesting. Is it the same for your blogs as your books?

KylieBrant said...

Deb, I tried three different pieces of the same excerpt in the same book and came back with three different authors, LOL. The last of the three was King. The other two were very literary authors whose names escape me. I'll bet no one comes back matching the Unabomber or Son of Sam. Just sayin'.

ForestJane said...

Several of my blog posts came up Margaret Atwood - but my blog's full of pictures, so they're mostly descriptive stuff, picture captions.

A "Choose an Unusual Murder Weapon" contest online had a 200 word max for the scene I wrote, that condensed text had me writing like James Fenimore Cooper.

A bit from a story with a lot of dialogue came up as being like William Gibson.

A chunk of quilting cutting and measuring instructions I'd written came up as Stephen King, for some reason. Think it's the word CUT? :p

Michele Hauf said...

Deb, I fed it two different blog posts and one got Jack London, the other Cory Doctorow.

I think it's pretty random.

Helen Brenna said...

I'm James Joyce, too! Cool!

Debra Dixon said...

The how the heck come every freaking thing I put in came back David Foster Wallace?

Maybe it was his day to be hall monitor??

Debra Dixon said...

And of course there is a world of difference between context and syntax. So, even though we all sound high-falutin, content, themes and structure change everything about what we've written. And character. And...

Well, you know what I mean. But it's fun. (g)

Michele Benard said...

I tried two things that I'm writing and it came back Cory Doctorow.