You read last week in The Rumpus about the new “statistical analysis tool” that tells you who you write like. Coding Robots, a group of software developers, seemingly created I Write Like just for fun; the page analyzes your word choice and writing style and spits back a writer it compares you to (out of a list of 50 writers, according to Dmitry Chestnykh in his interview with The Awl).
I pasted in a recent clip from my food blog Oats, a descriptive (and highly sensual, said a friend) description of corn, to see which author I Write Like would connect me to.
Think about a kernel of fresh corn. Imagine its coolness, its glassy surface and small firmness. The sweetest corn is just pale of butter yellow, so plump it wants to explode. You manage to wrangle it out of its dormancy within its stalk, shucking the papery peels into a brown bag on the front porch. All of the tiny tendrils keep cloying to the cob, refusing to relent this beautifully symmetrical art form to you. You finally get it as clean as it’s going to get, and you run your fingers down it because it’s as nice and easy as the warm evening all around. And think of the subtle pop this small entity makes when your teeth hits it; a tiny spurt of sugary juice, the crunch, the final realization that the tension of spring has finally burst and summer wants to melt all over you.
After a couple of seconds, the page changes and I learned, with surprise, that my writing style most closely resembled Kurt Vonnegut’s.
I Write Like makes its comparisons to literary giants like Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, and…gulp, Dan Brown. But don’t get too upset if the tool associates your style with The Da Vinci Code author. After learning that my writing style was similar to Vonnegut’s, I hastily scrounged the internet for a piece of his work and plugged in this random selection from his story “Where I Live” from Welcome to the Monkey House:
He wanted a martini, wondered if a nonmember could get service at the bar. He was appalled to discover that the club was nothing but a shack fourteen feet wide and thirteen feet long, a touch of the Ozarks in Massachusetts. It contained a hilariously warped picnic table, a wire lost-and-found basket with sandy, fragrant contents, and an upright piano that had been under a leak in the roof for years.
Interestingly, this selection (though I admit was chosen quite randomly) was characterized more like David Foster Wallace than Kurt Vonnegut. When Margaret Atwood tweeted that even her own writing wasn’t classified as sounding like Margaret Atwood on the site, Code Robot wrote back: “oops :). We’ll make sure to train the database with more of her works).”
Even though it may need to be a bit re-calibrated, the tool is a fun distraction to play around with. And so far, over 100,000 people have viewed it since its launch on July 9th. Code Robot is trying to attract an even stronger following by creating a subscription-based newsletter and sending its subscribers tips on becoming better writers, so that readers can transform their Dan Brown scrawls to David Foster Wallace-worthy prose.
