I Write Like...

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Edeyn Okay, so I spend a lot of time on FaceBook, and many of my friends and relatives post memes {pronounced 'meem'} -- the little tests that tell you what character from movie X you are like, or what kind of bean you're like, or how many roads you must travel {42}, etc. I normally don't even give them thought, but a good friend of mine who is pretty much the embodiment of youthful exuberance even though she's approaching 30 posted a fantastically interesting one that I had to try.
It is an analyzer for writing style to tell you which famous author you have a similar writing style to... so I tried a couple of samples.

Here are my samples and my results:
This was my response on a fun forum to which I belong for the question, "Cake or Pie?"

I shall choose the noble cheesecake. You see, when this very same querulous question were put to those deciding what the traditional treat consumed for the anniversary of each person's passing from a parasitic to an autonomous existence and the decision was made, rather than leave the query to the decision of the celebrants or even the individual marking the milestone it was decided that it should now and forever be, "Cake," of course. This was accepted. Many centuries later, however, the quiet and unassuming cheesepie (as she was called in those days of yore) volunteered to give up her essence, indeed her core identity as pie and infiltrate the social order of cake to try and understand what exactly these more sinister pastries -- you must admit and allow that cakes are the more devious of the two classifications, and infinitely more prone to nefarious deeds, to collude or conspire -- were doing to so indomitably retain their hold on the masses engaging in jubilation for such an interminable long time. What she found horrified her. Aghast at her decision to never again be allowed to join her sisters (for pie are all female and cake are all male) and instead be required to endure always being referred to as the sissy little brother, what she discovered in her investigation drove her to the depths of despair. She accepted her fate for a long while, silently suffering and her original state of being forgotten even to the great meat pie mother that was older than all other pies. Cheesepie had been amongst the eldest of pies, beaten only by the meat pie and few others in age. Of course, cake had been around for eight centuries when meat pie came to be over 2,170 years ago (cheesepie having originated only decades after meat pie). It was not until the 14th century that cheesecake decided that she needed to shake off her depression and deliver her report, whether the pie elders recalled having sent her on her mission or not! it took her another four hundred years to make that report, and her former existence had by then been erased from history. The report itself was astounding -- cakes, while just as nefarious and downright deceptive as has always been thought, had no influence in the decision at all. People simply lacked the imagination to effect change and were bound by the tradition as had been long established. She had become inured to the tauntings of being called a sissy and a pouf, but in these new times a thought occurred to her... being a pouf meant that she would be expected to associate with the pies, as they were all the girls. She began to help in the fight for rights of those that were of the minority in terms of their gender identity and sexual preference -- after all, every LGBT{I(Q)} rally that I have ever seen has had present as one of the many snacks of choice... cheesecake. Success was immediate and now anything that is emotionally charged with a happy feeling is referred to as... cheesecake. So, join me, fellow Oddballs, in rejoicing in the rich and lustrously varied history of one of my heroines. The noble and nigh deified cheesecake as a choice in this divisive question of personal choice.


I write like
Jonathan Swift

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Author of Gulliver's Travels -- so pretty nifty! My second sample was:
This is a sample from the beginning of my story, Victoriana...

Methinks, then, that I awoke in but an instant at the sounding of the chimes, meant to rouse me from the arms of Morpheus and to call my return clarion from prowling the lands of Noddis Ca'raan. And then whilst most distractedly and in a spate of uffish thought, mine arm didst throw off of myself the winsome companions of my mattresses -- indeed of my bed itself -- both furred and shirred. They did not cry out, for I had not given them voice nor leave to make words.

To my feet I ... stumbled. Much as I would prefer to boldly state that I sprang immediately to stance, it was instead more of a churlish and unpatterned series of rollicking thumps upon my bedchamber carpets punctuated by the cracking of my spine.

But stumbled, I did. In my stupor, still valiantly efforting to throw off the influences of the King of Dream, I made my way to the chamber containing the mad device used to whisk away all of mine offal and waste.

Groggily, as I settled there bemoaning my utter lack of some of the delightfully arcane brew of the Ethiopians (the one that restores the potence and senses of all those with the proclivities toward glacial awakenings), the terrestrial stage coalesces into existence and envelops my being...


I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Author of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- so still spiffy!

I find it interesting that both authors I got as a result are Irish with other similarities such as when they were writing, as well!

Thought I'd share and let folks here join in the fun!


Edeyn Hannah Blackeney
Wasn't it Jim Henson who said, "Without faith, I am nothing," after all? No, wait, that was God... Sorry, common mistake to make...

Oh hell. Using text from my

Oh hell.

Using text from my latest, A Country Life I received this:

I write like
Stephenie Meyer

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Then from Paradise of Fools, this:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

So if Kurt Vonnegut and Stephine Meyer had a baby, it would be me!

The weirdness never ceases.

~Lili

Blog: http://lilithlangtree.tglibrary.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/lilith_langtree

~Lili

Write the story that you most desperately want to read.

on reflection...

I have to say, it is just the COOLEST thing that I even HAVE any writing to submit for analysis, and the BCTS community is the reason why.

Consistent

From Heat Wave - I write like Margaret Mitchell

From Pop My Cork - I write like David Foster Wallace

From And 50 Cents for Your Soul - I write like David Foster Wallace

From Patton Pending - I write like David Foster Wallace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

The romance like Mitchell - my little comic pieces like Wallace

Commentator
Visit my Caption Blog: Dawn's Girly Site

Visit my Amazon Page: D R Jehs

Cory Doctorow?

I just fed it Green with Envy, and that's what I got. Now I need to look them up!

On the other hand, I tested 'Under Heaven, Over Hell', and I got...Frank L. Baum?!

That's just amazing!

EDIT: Apparently, my writing is a lot less consistent than I thought, this thing has told me that my writing style emulates Ann Rice, Mark Twain, and even Douglas Adams! Wild.

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause-of-effect...but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff.

Thanks, I'll definitely check that out!

I wish I knew how this program works, it just told me my latest installment of 'Free Spirit' was written by Isaac Asimov?!

Very confusing.

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause-of-effect...but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff.

Who am I?

Using "Never Trust the Pretty Ones," I write like Margaret Atwood.

Using "Ginger and Mr. Fogey," I write like Stephen King.

Using "Oscar Night," I write like Dan Brown.

Using "Ready? Okay!" I write like David Foster Wallace.

Using "While Sleeping Beautified," I write like Raymond Chandler.

So I appear to average out to a pulpy, mass-market mystery writer who deals with things on the edges of reality.

Best of all, the scifi story I wrote over at Stardust, "Morale Officer" says I write like Arthur Clarke.

(My magical fantasy there "Cat Fancier" comes up as William Gibson, so I missed the genre a little.)

Unfortunately...

Puddintane's picture

...it's a scam.

The site apparently makes no effort to analyze anything.

This:

qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm qwerty uiop asdf ghjkl zxcv bnm

Yields: Daniel Defoe

This:

Pellentesque nibh felis, eleifend id, commodo in, interdum vitae, leo. Praesent eu elit. Ut eu ligula. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Maecenas elementum augue nec nisl. Proin auctor lorem at nibh. Curabitur nulla purus, feugiat id, elementum in, lobortis quis, pede. Vivamus sodales adipiscing sapien. Vestibulum posuere nulla eget wisi. Integer volutpat ligula eget enim. Suspendisse vitae arcu. Quisque pellentesque. Nullam consequat, sem vitae rhoncus tristique, mauris nulla fermentum est, bibendum ullamcorper sapien magna et quam. Sed dapibus vehicula odio. Proin bibendum gravida nisl. Fusce lorem. Phasellus sagittis, nulla in hendrerit laoreet, libero lacus feugiat urna, eget hendrerit pede magna vitae lorem. Praesent mauris.

Yields: H. P. Lovecraft

This:

XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXX

Perhaps on a very bad day...

The "Blog" is so obviously fake that it hardly deserves the name, since Mark Twain is apparently still blogging from beyond the grave. Boy, was he ever surprised!

The site used to advertise a sleazy vanity publisher with this text:

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.

Since then, the blurb has been changed to advertise the "CodingRobots" diary software, the people who "designed" the software, probably because "i write like" + scam now yields well over a million hits.

Make your own I Write Like badge!

<!-- Begin I Write Like Badge -->
<div style="overflow:auto;border:2px solid #ddd;font:20px/1.2 Arial,sans-serif;width:380px;padding:5px; background:#F7F7F7; color:#555"><img src="http://s.iwl.me/w.png" style="float:right" width="120"><div style="padding:20px; border-bottom:1px solid #eee; text-shadow:#fff 0 1px"> I write like<br><a href="#" style="font-size:30px;color:#0000ff;text-decoration:none">XXXXXXX</a></div></div>
<!-- End I Write Like Badge -->

Just copy the text into your editor, Replace XXXXXXX with your preferred author, and you're golden, blessed by the irrefutable imprimatur of the Internet.

Note: I removed the spyware link from the code, as it originally passed your supposed author name to the "I Write Like" site, so your request to Amazon.com -- initiated by clicking on the author name -- was made through their site. There's no particular reason to do that sort of indirection, so I assume that they're up to no good.

If you'd like the link to go somewhere other than the top of the current page, you can replace the a href="#" with a href="http://whatever.com/" or any valid Web address.

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Scam or not

It's still entertaining. Still has the vanity publisher ad too, I should add.

And the HP lovecraft thing actually makes a kind of sense when you think about it. Cthulu Ftahgn!

Melanie E.

True

Puddintane's picture
I write like
ME!

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Okay, So Here It Is

According to the 'I Write Like' program, I am seriously Schizophrenic. Here are the results for some of my works;

Dance of the Baccha – Stephenie Meyer

The Legend of Alfildr – H. P. Lovecraft

The Gambit – Dan Brown

While the Band Played Waltzing Matilda – Stephen King

The World Turned Upside Down – James Joyce

Either I do not have a writing style, or I am a literary chameleon.

Nancy Cole

Nancy_Cole__Red_Background_.png


~ ~ ~

"You may be what you resolve to be."

T.J. Jackson

I don't care what anyone may say

But I can and will share this observation:

This blog is full of hilarity!!! ^_^

Faraway

P.S. Hey Lynceus, guess what? My introductory blog from a year back yielded this:

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!


On rights of free advertisement:
Big Closet Top Shelf

Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!

Faraway


On rights of free advertisement:
Big Closet Top Shelf

Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!

LOL

Does that make us the Two Cory's?

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause-of-effect...but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff.

I Resemble that Remark

Okay, go ahead. Laugh.

She's not laughing at you.

Yes she is.

No she isn't. She's making an observation.

Say's who?

I do, I do.

Who asked you?

Could you do us all a favor and go back and sit in a corner of the subconscious where you belong.

No! I won't I won't I won't. So there.

If you don't shut up, I'll sic my muse on you.

Go ahead, I'm not afraid of your big, bad muse.

(Note to Reader: Being a literary Schizophrenic when it comes to your writing ain't easy.)

Nancy Cole


~ ~ ~

"You may be what you resolve to be."

T.J. Jackson

"I write like" explained

erin's picture

I put about sixty pieces of my writing into the thing and kept tables and this seems to be how it works.

It's really a simple decision tree:

Non-standard Syntax? Y

Foreign Languages quoted? y James Joyce

n Anybody named Jim or Tom? y Mark Twain

else J.D. Salinger

N Bad Language? Y

Anybody say Fuck twice in one paragraph? y Chuck Palahniuk

n Children calling someone an asshole? y Stephen King

n Sex with dead people? y Anne Rice

n More than one telephone call scene? y William Gibson

else J. D. Salinger

N Misspelled words on purpose? Y

Roman numerals used more than once? y Raymond Chandler

n Good southern accent? y Mark Twain

n Bad southern accent y Margaret Mitchell

else J.D Salinger

N No dialog for more than two pages? Y

Big words that look made-up? y J.R.R. Tolkien

n Two paragraphs about cheese? y

w/ pirates? y Robert Louis Stevenson

w/o pirates y Charles Dickens

else Science correct? y

Starchy? y Arthur Clarke

else Isaac Asimov

else High bogosity? y Dan Brown

else James Joyce

N Nothing but dialog for more than one page? Y

Dreamlike? y Kurt Vonnegut

n Crazylike? y James Joyce

n More than one mention of tongues? y Ursula K. LeGuin

n Lingerie sizes discussed? y Ian Fleming

n people talking to vehicles? y Douglas Adams

else J. D. Salinger

N More than one paragraph on a page ends in a question? Y

Paris mentioned more than once? y Gertrude Stein

n Characters keep money in underwear? y Margaret Atwood

n Insects that no one is killing? y Ray Bradbury

else Agatha Christie

else Anyone on drugs? Y

Character depressed anyway? y David Foster Wallace

n Abbreviations rampant? y William Gibson

else Cory Doctorow

else

J.D. Salinger

Yes, everyone in the above list, except R.L. Stevenson (darn it) came up at least once as being someone I wrote like. Chuck Pahlaniuk came up six times. :)

If I'd only included a pirate talking about cheese in a story....

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Aw...Damn!

Andrea Lena's picture

...Chuck Palahniuk came up about seven times for me, and here I thought it's because the software knew that I sometimes fight with invisible manifestations of my crazy personality!

James Joyce came up for The Quiet Girl and Mario Puzo for Un Breve Parentesi...now there's a real kick in the head. And here I was hoping for Mickey Spillane or Barbara Cartland.


She was born for all the wrong reasons
but grew up for all the right ones
Con grande amore e di affetto, Andrea Lena

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

Creativity

Out of curiosity (like all the rest here, of course) I stuck in two pieces, one dialogue-driven and one of exposition. I apparently write like Stephen King and James Joyce, depending. I then stuck in a bit about riding around Wales, and surprise, surprise, Tolkien.
As part of my last degree I spent a long time on textual analysis, which isn't as dry and dull as it sounds, but is a very dense subject. One of my fun games was separating the two authors' contributions to"Good Omens" by Pratchett and Gaiman. To have a computer programme that can do that so quickly....as said above, bollocks.

I wonder how many fish they land?

Me too!

"The Genie", "Petra" and "Petra: I Will Survive" are apparently in the style of Cory Doctorow.
"Petra 2" (under construction) is in the style of Kurt Vonnegut.

"Goodbye Sam" - David Foster Wallace
"Multirhymes" - H.P. Lovecraft (I've so got to write a Whateley fanfic and try it out!)
"After the Fall" - Vladimir Nabokov

"Born in a Watery Grave" (not quite complete - you'll see it in the next few days) - Douglas Adams

Make of that what you will...

Then just for the hell of it, I fed it a few translations of Genesis 1...

NIV - Margaret Attwood
KJV - James Joyce
NCV - George Orwell

 

Bike Resources

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

In the name of meaningless

Jemima Tychonaut's picture

In the name of meaningless fun, I got on my first attempt:

I write like
Mary Shelley

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

And was so pleased I didn't try any other story! Hollywood, I'm ready for the film adaptation of my story now please!



"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

Experiment

laika's picture

Out of curiousity last night I hunted up the Molly Bloom siloloquy from ULYSSES online and put it in there. The program thinks that James Joyce writes like James Joyce. Then I entered the first couple of pages of the Vonnegut fable HARRISON BERGERSON, and got YOU WRITE LIKE KURT VONNEGUT...

So the program isn't totally random, like some kind of digital Magic 8 Ball coughing up YES / NO / MAYBE. Would like to see what results I get with less famous passages by other, less distinctive authors (maybe changing the names and cities, in case it's recognizing these or something...) but I'm lazy and have other goals for my day. Hopefully I'll be writing like SOMEBODY today, instead of playing with this damn thing...

~~hugs (arsis longa, velveeta breakfast), Laika

.
"Government will only recognize 2 genders, male + female,
as assigned at birth-" (In his own words:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1lugbpMKDU

I got a couple

of chuck Palaniuk hits for my stories, a couple of Anne Rice, and a Steven King. I had not been familiar with Palaniuk before, so I wiki'ed him, I am flattered, I think.

DogSig.png

How it really works...

Taking a link trawl around the author's site, I eventually dug up an interview where he explains the algorithm:

Actually, the algorithm is not a rocket science, and you can find it on every computer today. It's a Bayesian classifier, which is widely used to fight spam on the Internet. Take for example the "Mark as spam" button in Gmail or Outlook. When you receive a message that you think is spam, you click this button, and the internal database gets trained to recognize future messages similar to this one as spam. This is basically how "I Write Like" works on my side: I feed it with "Frankenstein" and tell it, "This is Mary Shelley. Recognize works similar to this as Mary Shelley." Of course, the algorithm is slightly different from the one used to detect spam, because it takes into account more stylistic features of the text, such as the number of words in sentences, the number of commas, semicolons, and whether the sentence is a direct speech or a quotation.

And what's a Bayesian classifier? You could try Wikipedia, but that article may leave you more confused than before. And here's WP's description of Bayesian spam filters.

So at a rough guess, when fed the training data, it looks for words (probably frequently occurring words more than x letters long), the standard readability statistics (e.g. words per sentence, characters per word), punctuation usage and probably a whole crop of filters to determine the usage of reported speech. It presumably assigns a score to each parameter it's been told to look at and stores them in a database.
When it analyses your text, it generates the same set of statistics before doing a lookup and spitting out the author who's the closest match.

 

Bike Resources

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!