Flattered by a website I'd never heard of before today...
I follow Margaret Atwood on Twitter just because there's something awesome about Margaret Fucking Atwood being a tweeter. Mostly she tweets about public interest stuff going on in Canada, but today she had a couple of tweets like this one in reference to I Write Like, a website that purports to take a sample block of text and tell you who you write like (natch):
Which, of course, is funny because you might think Margaret Atwood would write like, oh, I don't know, Margaret Atwood. So I wouldn't say whatever engine or algorithm these folks use is all that. Particularly since Atwood has a distinctive style, y'know?
Well, anyway, of course I had to do it myself. Twice. I cut'n'pasted a 6,000 word short story several of you have read for me (thanks!) and yesterday's "Naderized" blog entry, and (oddly enough) I got the same result both times:
OK, so now I write like James Joyce... http://bit.ly/bBCMB3 What leads us to believe there aren't many choices? Jane Austen, anyone?
Which, of course, is funny because you might think Margaret Atwood would write like, oh, I don't know, Margaret Atwood. So I wouldn't say whatever engine or algorithm these folks use is all that. Particularly since Atwood has a distinctive style, y'know?
Well, anyway, of course I had to do it myself. Twice. I cut'n'pasted a 6,000 word short story several of you have read for me (thanks!) and yesterday's "Naderized" blog entry, and (oddly enough) I got the same result both times:
Well, hell yeah, I'll take it. Not sure I believe it. But, y'know, who would be offended to be told you were writing like one of the legendary writers of the 20th Century, right?
So, there it is. Feeling pretty good about that. Thanks, random anonymous website with a screwed up text comparison algorithm!
Anyone else want to give this one a try?
Postscript: It's a pretty crappy algorithm, however they're doing it. Running Neil Gaiman's "I Cthulhu" through it, the software gloms onto old Big C and reports back that the piece is written like H.P. Lovecraft. But "I Cthulhu" isn't really pastiche in spite of the title and the tone is pretty much typical Gaiman--whimsical British fantasy--despite the Lovecraftian subject matter.
Ah, well. I'll still take my results as flattering....
So, there it is. Feeling pretty good about that. Thanks, random anonymous website with a screwed up text comparison algorithm!
Anyone else want to give this one a try?
Postscript: It's a pretty crappy algorithm, however they're doing it. Running Neil Gaiman's "I Cthulhu" through it, the software gloms onto old Big C and reports back that the piece is written like H.P. Lovecraft. But "I Cthulhu" isn't really pastiche in spite of the title and the tone is pretty much typical Gaiman--whimsical British fantasy--despite the Lovecraftian subject matter.
Ah, well. I'll still take my results as flattering....
Comments
It wasn't Vonnegut.
My nonfiction was like James Joyce.
My fiction was like James Joyce, Stephen King (a couple of times) or Dan Brown.
I wouldn't be particularly excited about the latter. ;)
It does make sense that results would be different - I adopt different styles to tell different stories.
Is that a sign of an amateur-ish writer? Or is is the norm? I guess I'm asking - does James Joyce always write like James Joyce, or is the range of "James Joyce" quite a bit wider than an algorithm can capture?
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clucki: The name of a barnyard Valley girl.
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Dr. Phil
The British, of course, saved the world, albeit at the tragic cost of George III's sanity. While we've all heard the popular myth that his madness was caused by inbreeding, the tragic fact is that he lost his mind at the ley lines convergence at Stonehenge during the 1782 Winter Solstice, calling upon the succor of Nodens, who alone of all the Outer Gods is friendly towards our tiny species.
Anyway, the only point in going through this well-traveled ancient history, which I expect all of my readers are pretty familiar with anyway, is that H.P. Lovecraft totally cribbed his style from Thomas Jefferson, especially from Jefferson's infamous edited New Testament, in which he omitted all miracles, focused on the parables and aphorisms, and replaced Jesus' name with Cthulhu's whenever it appeared in the text.
http://gawker.com/5587658/what-famous-writer-does-mel-gibson-sound-like
Also funny: that Palin "writes like" H.P. Lovecraft. They certainly both cause nightmares with their descriptions of horrific alternate realities, so maybe that's not too far off....