I write like …

Have you heard of this? It’s a website where you can paste in text and it tells you what famous author it thinks you write like. This is a funny and interesting thing to try! Sure, I Write Like, tell me who I write like.

TUYO –> I write like … Neil Gaiman.

RIHASI –> I write like … Dan Brown. Ha, ugh, no, I don’t think so!

KERAUNANI –> I write like … Kurt Vonnegut.

You’re picking completely random authors, aren’t you?

TANO –> I write like … Mark Twain.

Really?

NO FOREIGN SKY –> I write like … Arthur C Clarke. Well, at least it can tell this is SF rather than something else.

Yes, this is obviously random. That’s really a bit disappointing! Let me try to find something a bit less random and possibly even somewhat vaguely rigorous. Okay! Here is a different site: WHO DO YOU WRITE LIKE? The former link is to a research page. Here’s the casual non-research page that does the same thing.

Okay, this site declares it’s using public domain works and therefore you’ll get results that compare your writing to authors writing a long time ago. What results do I get this time?

TUYO –> I write like … Samuel Pepys. Sort of like. The similarity goes from -1.0 to 1.0. Pepys — whose work I have never read — looks like about a 0.45 for me. The first author here whose work I’ve actually read is GK Chesterton. That’s about a 0.4. I don’t write much like Charles Darwin. Well, of course not, honestly they should divide fiction from nonfiction, I bet I have written work that is in fact a good deal more like Darwin than TUYO is! My eye wants to interpret those numbers as correlation coefficients, which also range from -0.1 to 1.0, but although that seems like a reasonable interpretation, I don’t know if that’s what they actually are.

Let me try RIHASI, which of course is in a different style. Does this instrument think so? —> I write like …. Lucy Maud Montgomery. Never heard of her. Correlation (or whatever) is almost 0.5. Second is John Muir, whom I’ve heard of, but I don’t think I’ve read anything by him. Pepys has moved substantially downward. Philip K Dick and Jane Austen are now in the top five.

How about NO FOREIGN SKY? –> I write like … Here’s Lucy Maud Montgomery at the top again. That’s interesting? Who IS she? OH! Anne of Green Gables! I’ve never read it. John Muir has shifted downward, Jane Austen downward A LOT. None of the correlations are as high as 0.5.

Let me try one more — THE FLOATING ISLANDS, because of course that’s MG/YA, so let’s see if that comes out at all differently. Oh, look, Lucy Maud Montgomery moves down ten or fifteen places, with Willa Cather moving to the top. Interesting! She wasn’t close to the top for the others. I’ve never read anything of hers either, but as she won the Pulitzer, I sure don’t mind being compared to her. Again, about a 0.5 correlation.

I have no idea what the highest correlations might be for authors dropping ten thousand words or so into this tool. That information doesn’t look like it’s available. That’s too bad. I’d be interested. I’d actually like to read their methodology section, assuming they’ve written papers on their results.

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