I Write Like...

[Scattercat]

Check for yourself.

Apparently, I write like David Foster Wallace and/or H.P. Lovecraft.  I am uncertain how accurate this thing is...

[lmh]

I write like Arthur C Clarke.

How cool is that !!!

[Seraphim]

Some years ago I received an encouraging rejection letter from a SFF editor (my story was not quite the right subgenre for them) comparing my writing to "Ambrose Bierce at his best". Not having read very much of Bierce, I don't exactly what elements he found similar...maybe Bierce was longwinded, still I thought it a nice compliment.

[Boggled Coriander]

I tried my three flash contest submissions.  I write like Margaret Atwood (Pseudopod flash), or David Foster Wallace (first EP flash), or James Joyce (second EP flash, not yet posted).

And the story I'm currently working on, which has now exceeded 4000 words, is also Atwoodian.

Clearly it's related to my Canadian birth.

[Alasdair5000]

Check for yourself.

Apparently, I write like David Foster Wallace and/or H.P. Lovecraft.  I am uncertain how accurate this thing is...

Dan Brown.  Or James Fenimore Cooper.  Which presumably means I will eventually be crying myself to sleep on my HUGE PILES OF MONEY in a manly, dutiful fashion.

[eytanz]

My PhD thesis, apparently, was written in the style of H. P. Lovecraft (well, at least the first and last two pages are).

[FireTurtle]

Margaret Atwood and Anne Rice. Well. Hmmm. Have to think about that. Will enter some EP stuff later to see what I get.

[Heradel]

My PhD thesis, apparently, was written in the style of H. P. Lovecraft (well, at least the first and last two pages are).

My BA thesis also came up Lovecraft, maybe it's the lack of quote marks?

The short story I submitted I came up as Vonnegut.

[deflective]

this test seems to be more about which author wrote about a similar subject than which has a similar style.

i plug in an essay on religion and it returns Dan Brown, a screen play's stage direction gives James Joyce, an ea forum post gives Edgar Allen Poe.

[Boggled Coriander]

Okay, I've lost faith, so now I'm just screwing with it.

A couple of paragraphs consisting of nothing but "the" : Edgar Allen Poe.

A selection of naughty words, repeated ad nauseum, and nothing else : Stephen King.

Same deal, but with clinical terms for parts of the human reproductive system: Chuck Palahniuk.

Okay, I'm done.

[eytanz]

Heh.

To experiment, I copied in progressively more of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I started by pasting in the first paragraph, and then added one at a time.

Here are the results:

# of paragraphs - style
1 - Jack London
2-5 - David Foster Wallace
6-12 - Dan Brown
13+ H. P. Lovecraft

In other words, it takes at least 13 paragraphs of one of Lovecraft's most iconical stories to be correctly identified as being in his style.

In a second test, instead of inputting the paragraphs cumulatively, I inserted them one at a time. Here is who the analyzer thinks wrote the first 13 paragraphs of Shadows Over Innsmouth:

1 - Jack London
2 - David Foster Wallace
3 - David Foster Wallace
4 - Ursula K. Le Guin
5 - Arthur Conan Doyle
6 - Dan Brown
7 - Stephen King
8 - James Joyce
9 - Dan Brown
10 - Kurt Vonnegut
11 - Charles Dickens
12 - James Joyce
13 - H. P. Lovecraft

Out of curiosity, I took the tenth paragraph, which is identified as Vonnegut, and tested to see the minimal changes I could make to change the style. Changing "Railroad" to "road" makes the style come up as Le Guin. Interstingly, however, changing "war of 1812" to "war of 2812" makes the style be identifiable as Lovecraft.

Finally, I typed in the first paragraph of lovecraft backwards (from a word-order point of view, not letter by letter), and it still identified it as Jack London - it very clearly is just looking for keywords, and maybe properties like sentence lengths, but ignoring actual sentence structure, which is sort of crucial in these things.

[DToland]

I grabbed some pieces of my writing at random.  The names that came up were:

Dan Brown
Mark Twain
Stephen King
James Joyce
Kurt Vonnegut

Fun little webapp, but I'm not sold on it.  I suspect it does little more than generate some sort of hash code and use that to index into a list of authors.

[Seraphim]

My first reply in this thread was written without noticing the like in the op. I thought is was just asking what people had said about our writing.  So wrong.

I tried two pieces of writing on the site and got back two very different analyses. The first said my writing was like Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code). I've not read him, so I don't know if that is a good thing or not. 

The second came back as Vladimir Nabokov, definitely classier.  I wonder what a third selection would show? 

Addendum: Tried a third, it came up Harry Harrison.  I reposted one of my first selections to see if it would churn up another random name, but it came back the same as it did the first time.