Here’s a great little toy. You enter a sample of your writing and it compares it to the writing of famous authors. I did it three times with paragraphs from three recent blog posts and got three different authors: Stephen King, Margaret Atwood and P.G. Wodehouse. Either I am exceptionally talented or, more likely, I have no style of my own.
I saw this first on Twitter, then at Byzantium’s Shores. If the comments over there are any indication, almost everyone writes like Stephen King.
UPDATE: (7/19) How it works.
July 14th, 2010 - 7:55 am
I gave it two samples. One said I wrote like Margaret Atwood. The second said I wrote like James Joyce. While I do like some of Atwood’s books, I am kind of creeped out that my writing aligns me with a feminist social campaigner. I guess I can relate more to an overly-wordy drunk. Yes, I generalize.
July 14th, 2010 - 8:14 am
I turned in several samples, and ultimately Stephen King won out.
July 14th, 2010 - 10:07 am
It told me I sounded like Dan Brown. Of all the arguments I’ve considered for giving up the blog, that’s the closest to being a persuasive one.
I would have been much happier had I got P.G. Wodehouse.
However, my technical writing - a couple paragraphs from a journal article I had published that was still on my hard drive - seems to sound like Isaac Asimov, so that calms me down a bit.
July 14th, 2010 - 10:44 am
Try samples from several different posts on your blog. I bet you’ll get a different author every time.
July 14th, 2010 - 10:51 am
I tried two that I thought were very different, got Dan Brown for both, and gave up in disgust.
July 16th, 2010 - 10:57 pm
I would compare you to Stephen King only in the sense that you have a remarkable talent for transcribing intangible feelings into words through the use of metaphor.
July 17th, 2010 - 8:09 pm
Really? I didn’t know I did that. Usually when I use a metaphor I’m thinking, “Geez this sounds stupid but I don’t know how else to say it.”
July 19th, 2010 - 1:09 am
Heh. I posted three different pages from my novel and got Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells and then J. K. Rowling. So I pasted a much longer section (about 5 pages) and got Stephen King. Then I did it again with a different long section (also 5 pages) and again got Stephen King.
I’m wondering if Stephen King might be a kind of ‘default’ value when it doesn’t really know.
July 19th, 2010 - 9:24 am
I am embarrassed that I do not have a short story, novel or space opera lying around on my hard drive for the test, so I used the samples from where I write, which is my blog. Multiple samples yielded Cory Doctorow as the author I am most like, although some more mundane ones actually yielded Chuck Palahniuk and H.P. Lovecraft. Scary!
July 19th, 2010 - 11:21 am
I would like to see the complete list of authors that it uses. I keep playing with it. I tried my “I need a clone” post and got Cory Doctorow.