Yesterday Electric Literature tweeted about I Write Like, a new website that supposedly tells you exactly which famous author your writing style most resembles. All you have to do is copy paste an example of your writing into a box on their main page (be it fiction, blog posts, essays), then bam! Get ready for your author.
So what do you guys think? Is I Write Like accurate or a bit off the mark?
5 responses
I posted about it on my blog as well. I got Stephen King for something I’ve been working on for a while and James Joyce for a paragraph where one of my characters is telling a story.
I don’t know if it’s all that accurate. How are they figuring this out, is what I want to know. What are the variables on this website that is taking the internet by storm?
I’ve never read Joyce (I’m terrible, I know) and while I loved The Shining, I’ve not read enough by Stephen King to tell you if my writing is actually like his.
I think this may be astrology for aspiring writers, which is to say it’s either bullshit, or very, very dangerous, depending on your level of belief in the results.
I couldn’t write like James Joyce, Ian Fleming, Stephen King AND Margaret Atwood.
So I ran text that was actually from a few of the writers in the database through IWL, and here’s what I found:
David Foster Wallace writes like David Foster Wallace. Stephen King writers like David Foster Wallace. Chuck Palahniuk writes like Stephen King as well as Vladimir Nabokov, who writes like Charles Dickens, who writes like James Joyce.
@Regis Ha!
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