In the interests of science I did a little more checking of the I Write Like site
http://iwl.me/ ...of course the obvious experiment is to give it the writing of famous authors and see if it correctly identifies it... So, I gave it a few paragraphs of Sherlock Holmes, and lo and behold it says I write like Arthur Conan Doyle (who was indeed the author). And then I gave it a few paragraphs of Pride and Prejudice, and it said Jane Austen which is of course correct... However, when I gave it a few paragraphs of Mein Kampf, it said I wrote like Mary Shelly. She's the author of Frankenstein most notably...Mein Kampf was of course written by Adolph Hitler...This is perhaps not as bad a mismatch as it sounds - if you ever care to read a little bit of Mein Kampf (which I'm not really recommending) you'll find that he wrote in a rather Gothic sort of style....very ornate verbose sort of first person writing... Then, I gave it a few paragraphs of War and Peace, and it said I wrote like Margaret Mitchell...now, Gone with the Wind is similar to War and Peace in that both are long historical kind of epics, but for goodness sake, Tolstoy is Tolstoy and we ought to be able to identify him (the man wrote voluminously so there is no shortage of text from which to build models etc...) More curiously, I gave it the text from my home page, and it said I wrote like Cory Doctorow, and author I'm not familiar with...it also says the text of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is like him...so he seems perhaps to be some sort of default - if all else fails you write like Cory Doctorow... Anyway - just probing a bit at the limits of this site. It does seem to be affiliated with an online writing course, so they have some interest in making you feel good by telling you that you write like a famous author (rather than saying - you are illiterate and hereby banned from this site). That said they are doing this reasonably well and so it's not just a gimmick or anything... Oh - where did I get all these literary texts? Project Gutenberg of course... http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Enjoy, Ted On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 11:58 PM, Ted Pedersen <duluth...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is an interesting site that takes your writing as input, and then > tells you what famous author you write like. > > http://iwl.me/ > > I did this with a few randomly selected email messages I've written > (that were a bit long, as is my custom with email :) > > The result - based on three different samples - each one said I write > like David Foster Wallace.... > > http://iwl.me/s/d7939cdb > > That's perhaps a good thing from a writing point of view - not so > great in terms of role models perhaps as he killed > himself not long ago... > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace > > So...make of it what you will. > > -- > Ted Pedersen > http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse > -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
