Sunday, August 15, 2010

I Write Like Who, Again?

The answer to the question from my last post was The Expendables, by the way. Highly entertaining movie if it's the sort of thing you like (which I do), and whatever you thought of the trailer and ads is almost definitely what you'll think of the movie.

Anyway, there's a website people have been talking about lately called I Write Like, which supposedly analyzes a writing sample from you and tells you which well-known author your writing resembles. I don't know the technical details behind it, but just for fun I ran four of my posts from this blog through it.

Three of them came back as David Foster Wallace, while the outlier was Cory Doctorow. I've never read any of Wallace's works, and though I recognized the name, I only really knew that he was a writer and had committed suicide a couple of years ago. But reading about him in Wikipedia makes me definitely want to read his stuff for myself. As for Doctorow, I've read some of his essays online and articles in Wired, so I'm familiar with him. I guess I don't see the comparison, but I have a lot of respect for Doctorow, so I certainly don't mind.

Of course, you can't read too much into things like this. But they're fun to play around with, and the temporary ego boost is nice.

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