I came across You Write Like, where you can input text that you’ve written, a form of necromancy passes through your hard drive, and you are assigned a literary doppelganger.
I input about a half-dozen bodies of text that I’ve done, from stories on here to a some paragraphs from my book. About four times I was compared to Mark Twain, while on the other two I got Nabokov. Then I became smartalecky and submitted text from a random paragraph generator, which resulted in Jane Austen all the five times I did it. Then I submitted some random Facebook status updates that I found on a site. Five out of six said they were Chuck Palahniuk.
Even though it smacks of those ubiquitous make-your-own-quizz stupidness that was the rage a few years ago, this seems to have more substance, even though the developers apparently think Austen was a schizophrenic and Palahniuk is a lovelorn teenage girl. I agree on the latter.
Anyone else get some interesting results?
11 Comments
The generator goes by keywords, and possibly marks — though I can’t fully say that for sure. When using a text with ghost, whisper, and blood I got S. King, but then one with more religious keywords I got Arthur C. Clarke.
I assumed it analyzed writing style, which is something too complex for Javascript to do (I assume they used JS).
That’s two assumptions so far, so I’m probably wrong.
LOL here are some band lyric comparisons
Rihanna- “Disturbia” = Bram Stoker
The Devil Wears Prada- “Outnumbered”= Johnathan Swift
Breaking Benjamin- “Crawl”=Chuck Palahniuk
Charlie Daniels-“The Devil Went Down to Georgia”= Margaret Mitchell
the Happy Birthday Song= Gertrude Stein (I tried different names, and it gave me random other results, but this one was the funniest because all I said was “Dear”)
After Edmund-“Fighting For Your Heart”= Ray Bradbury
Frank Sinatra-“My Way”= David Foster Wallace (????)
Black Eyed Peas-“Meet Me Halfway”= Daniel Defoe
Good idea with the lyrics. Never heard of Wallace either, if that’s what you were implying with the ???. He’s a pretty recent guy so that might be why.
I entered a short story of mine and according to this website I write like Leo Tolstoy.
Nice. Care to share the story? I’d like to read…
Sent to your email…
I tried to submit some of my Facebook status and also some of
my blog. The result that I got is that I write like James Joyce and Louis
Stevenson. This is an interesting site and I really can’t imagine how its java
script works.
Hey Charlie…yeah, I only know some javascript but that thing is probably a beast.
Your title “Your Writing is Terrible: You Write like a Dead Person” caught my attention. I have a friend. Her name is Maria Burch and she told me once that she gets frustrated every time her boss tells her that her writing is a crap. I felt sad for her.
Wow. Spam comments are becoming really hard to point out these days.