Regular web surfers have likely come across dozens of articles and blog posts about I Write Like, a website that tells you which writer’s style you match based on a writing sample of a few paragraphs.
It’s not too scientific, but it’s fun way to kill a lunch hour. So I entered a few paragraphs from a story I wrote about an exhibit of photos of Ellis Island at the Michener Museum, and the site said I wrote like Kurt Vonnegut (cool, that’s the guy from Back to School). Another writing sample was apparently in the style of H.P. Lovecraft.
Then things got interesting. Megan Sullivan, the Packet’s magazine editor, entered some graphs from a story she wrote about 2009’s Princyclopedia. The theme for that year’s event was Alice in Wonderland, and Megan threw in some Lewis Carroll-type wording. Sure enough, I Write Like said Megan writes just like Carroll.
Next I went to The Guttenberg Project and copied some text out of various classic works. It turns out Mark Twain wrote like Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens wrote like Charles Dickens. But Edgar Allen Poe wrote like Lovecraft, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote like Poe.
The last experiment came when I entered some Timeoff calendar listings, which are style-less, lists of information, and I Write Like said they were in the style of Dan Brown.
Maybe this thing is onto something.
