Tuesday, July 13, 2010

WHOM Do You Write Like?

Just a quick post to share this fun little app I found courtesy of Galley Cat at mediabistro.com. It's called "I Write Like" and was created by Coding Robots and the journal-writing software Memoires by Mac. Paste in a sample of your writing and it will analyze it and tell you what famous writer you write like.

I plugged in some paragraphs from a post I did on Highly Sensitive People and it (rapidly) came back as Stephen King. Imagine that.


I write like
Stephen King
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Curious, I plugged in the first couple of pages of my Churches, Chickens and ChiChi's manuscript and it came back as Chuck Palahnuik. Since I had no idea who that was (sorry, Chuck!), imagine my surprise when I googled and found out he's the author of "Fight Club" and half a dozen other novels and writes in a genre known as transgressional fiction. Heck. I had to google that, too.

What I read made me blush. Well, not so much at what I read, but that my work might be considered transgressional. And that I'm such a noob.

Why Chuck Palahnuik? (And, why IS it I feel the need to analyze everything?) Could it have been because of the profanity in that first couple of pages? Or because my mc refers to her thong-clad ass in reference to the peepy next door? Probably.

I had to try one more, so I cut a few paragraphs from a different chapter, one that was written in her mother's voice. Now it says I write like Dan Brown. I hope it meant as in one of his earlier novels. Not that last one. Ha. I wonder if it tells you if your writing stinks? Probably not.

Whatever. It is entertaining. And I learned something. I learned that there's a whole other genre out there in the arts that I could aim for. Which means I could write that really naughty paragraph back in that I felt the need to censor, lol.

So, if you haven't already (and I bet you have!) click on over and see who YOU write like. And let me know. Then put a badge on your blogger site so everybody else can play, too.

19 comments:

Anne Gallagher said...

What a totally cool thing to do. And I'm going to do it right now!

Nighfala said...

OMG! Whom, not who, whom! Whom do you write like? You write like whom?

Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. I'm okay now, really.

Sorry.

Nighfala said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Nighfala said...

OMG! I write like James Joyce.

I guess I'm going to go have to read one of his books now. I've actually always wanted to read "Ulysses." I have a vacation coming up so I guess I'll take it along.

Thank you for this very, very cool tool!

As a statistician, I am very curious how this works.

I tried different passages from my novel and got James Fenimore Cooper once and three Stephen King's. Just out of curiosity, I pasted in some text by J.R.R. Tolkein to see if it would identify him, and it did.

Rats. I so want to be Tolkein!

Jemi Fraser said...

This is a fun site! Apparently on my blog I write like Margaret Atwood & in my MS I write like Stephen King. Fun stuff :)

Olivia J. Herrell, writing as O.J. Barré said...

Piedmont, who did you come up with? Oh wait, WHOM??

Christine, I never can get that right, sheesh. I'll go fix it. :)

Ooo, you got James Joyce and James Fenimore Cooper, how cool is that? Margaret Atwood tweeted that she apparently writes like Stephen King...or was that someone else. Anyway, it told her she wrote like someone other than herself! Too funny.

Jemi, read my comment to Christine about MA. I know, I had fun, too!

Roland D. Yeomans said...

Like you, Olivia, it first told me I wrote like Stephen King, then like Dan Brown. I stopped lest it tell me I write like Bizarro.

How does it come up with its results I wonder. Roland

Nighfala said...

If "who" is the subject of the sentence..."Who is there?" then it is correct. But if it is the object of a verb or preposition, then it should be "whom". "Whom do you like?" (whom is the object of the verb like, the subject of the sentence is "you").

My other pet peeve is misusing "I" and "me." I is the subject, me is an object. "I gave it to him." "He gave it to me." Therefore, "My wife and I gave it to him." is correct, and "He gave it to my husband and me" is also correct. Not "..to my husband and I."

I hear it all the time, on TV and in print. Drives me crazy. :oP

Francine Howarth said...

Hi,

First off thanks for dropping by my blog and for pressing the friend button!

Okay, so I write like James Joyce and Virgina Woolf as far as historical excerpts go.

As for modern romance excerpts I picked up Chuck Palahnuik (he of "Fight Club" fame and Joanna Trollope! Great surname that for sexy romances. ;)

best

VR Barkowski said...

This is a really fun thing to do, but like others, I'd love to know how the analysis works. I write like Stephen King, but when I put in some Stephen King text, it says he writes like Ian Fleming. LOL.

Oh, and I am so glad I'm not the only one who didn't recognize Chuck Palahnuik's name!

Olivia J. Herrell, writing as O.J. Barré said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Olivia J. Herrell, writing as O.J. Barré said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Olivia J. Herrell, writing as O.J. Barré said...

Roland, I'm such a geek I looked up Bizarro just to make sure there wasn't one! :) Christine H. has some theories about how it's done, check out her blog, The Writer's Hole.

Christine, thanks!

Francine, hey there! You have an awesome blog, my pleasure. And congrats on your published novels, I'll have to get back over your way and check them out soon. You think Trollope is her pen name? It's a good one.:)

VR, I'm glad I'M not the only one to learn about Chuck P. today. I saw a tweet by Margaret Atwood, it thought she wrote like someone else, too!

The Words Crafter said...

Oh my gosh, I've pasted in several excerpts of my blog posts and poetry and got: Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, and, my fav, JRR Tolkien! I thought maybe it analyzed key words or sentence structure, but the ones I thought would come up Poe or King, came up as Dickens...curious. And, thanks for my new toy...I'll probably play on this site till they send me a restraining order, lol!

Arlee Bird said...

Interesting site--thanks for sharing. I gave it three samples. The first two said I wrote like David Foster Wallace. Had to Google the name and after doing so I do recall reading an article about him recently and he seems to be highly respected--and dead. I don't mind being compared to him even though I'm not familiar with his work.
The third time I entered a sample of a flash fiction I did on my blog and it compared me to Dan Brown. Cool--I'll take the money he's made.
Don't know how this works, but I'll have to play with it some more.

Lee
Tossing It Out

Unknown said...

« "He gave it to my husband and me" is also correct. Not "..to my husband and I."

I hear it all the time, on TV and in print. Drives me crazy. »

Back when I was a kid, people tended to err in the other direction, as in "Steve and me (or, horrors, Me and Steve) went to the store" so I believe that mistake was focused on to such an extent that it caused a backlash!

I tried different blog entries and came up with Margaret Mitchell, David Foster Wallace and Raymond Chandler.

Arlee Bird said...

Okay, I just now entered a passage from the Bible Book of Jonah, NIV translation, and it came up as Kurt Vonnegut. But then I entered a passage from Huckleberry Finn and it correctly came up as Mark Twain.
I'm keeping this site.

Lee
Tossing It Out

Olivia J. Herrell, writing as O.J. Barré said...

Okay, I had to play some more. I pasted in different passages from my ms, one for each different character and each one came up with a different author. Which is probably a good thing, yes? Doesn't that mean they don't all sound like the same person? Yes. Yes, it does. Yeehaa!

My mc is Stephen King, repeatedly. Her mother, Margaret Mitchell (woohoo! I like that one!!). Her father, William Gibson (whose book "Neuromancer" I might just have to buy). El Creepo, H.P. Lovecraft. And the romantic dude, David Foster Wallace. Hmmm. I'll take 'em all.

Oh, and I pasted in a short story I recently wrote about a fairy princess and got Anne Rice.

Yeah. This is quite fun! :D

Vicki Rocho said...

LOVED it! I did a blog post and it came out as Chuck P (thank you for telling me who he was...) Then I did the first page or two of my WIP and it came back as Ian Fleming.

Too much fun...

So did anyone type in a bit of Stephen King and see what the comparison was?

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