"I Write Like..." Analysis

[gendou]

I've seen several people doing this "I Write Like..." analysis on their journals.
I like the idea, so I pasted in a chapter of the Aberrant Story to test it out.

Comments

[nefariousgrey]

Aw man, and here I thought my writing style really WAS comparable to Stephen King. GOTTA CRUSH MY DREAMS.

But seriously, I'm not surprised. It's probably completely randomly generated, since most people probably wouldn't even know half of the authors that pop up.

A personality-ish quiz is arbitrary? THIS IS A SHOCKING TWIST.

[gendou]

It may not even be randomly generated. It may just have a severely flawed (or severely limited) analysis capacity.
I admit, I really wanted this thing to work. It certainly would stroke my ego to be told that I write like "Big Famous Admired Author" and be able to trust the results, but the evidence prevents me from trusting any conclusion the engine generates.

Of course, an apologist for the engine might point out that perhaps I have five different writing styles in five different chapters. But considering I got similarly differing results just by pasting in random Lovecraft stories, I have to assume that the analysis is deeply broken on some level.

[insoumis]

I just tried it out as well, with similar results (I too got Dan Brown, along with Joyce, King, Nabokov, and Dickens). So I decided to plug in excerpts from various authors I admire and got this:

John Steinbeck writes like Harry Harrison.
Salman Rushdie writes like Douglas Adams.
John Krakauer writes like Edgar Allen Poe.
James Joyce, oddly enough, writes like James Joyce.

Hmm.

[gendou]

Salman Rushdie writes like Douglas Adams?
Now it's just being stupid.

I really wish it would outline how it comes to the results it reaches, because now I'm wondering what kind of heavy-duty crack it has been smoking.

[insoumis]

I think it's pretty arbitrary. Unless you plug in a story by an author that's specifically in its database (Joyce stories all come back as Joyce, as do ones by Dickens), then it's basically a crapshoot.

[gendou]

One of my favorite authors got ahold of this and posted his thoughts on the matter.
He thinks it might be an advertising scheme of some sort, and I'm inclined to agree with that analysis.