The brother/sister of crystaluni's writing analyser, this one tells you which author your writing most resembles.

Click --> http://iwl.me/

(I got Douglas Adams. Neat!)

Let's give this one a whirl.

Ok, so I analyzed a whole bunch of stuff.....

Rank One: David Foster Wallace (with over 8 entries)

Rank Two: Stephen Hawking (4)

Rank Three: I think I got about, 6 other entries which were all different people. (1)

I tried a bunch of different texts, to see whether anything would come up consistently, and how many different answers I'd get.

Short stories: JD Salinger, William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Ian Fleming

Poems: Arthur Conan Doyle, David Foster Wallace, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Dan Brown , David Foster Wallace, George Orwell, Charles Dickens

Cover letter for a job application: David Foster Wallace

Band bio: Arthur C. Clarke

Songs: Ursula K. Le Guin, H. G. Wells, Harry Harrison, David Foster Wallace H. G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace

1000-word diary excerpts: Douglas Adams, William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Douglas Adams, David Foster Wallace, Douglas Adams, Douglas Adams, James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace


So I guess I'm 30% Wallace, 10% Fleming, 10% Adams, 50% misc.

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You like music, yes? I made some for you.

On the basis of recent sent emails it appears that I am in the David Foster Wallace gang too.

H.G. Wells !?

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I analysed my post above, and apparently it's Dan Brown. :p

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You like music, yes? I made some for you.

Dan Brown does drop a lot of proper nouns in his writing. After reading one of his books, I feel as if I don't need to travel to the book's location, because I've already been to those places.

Tried it with a series of six short stories I wrote recently(ish) and got 2 Douglas Adams', 2 Dan Brown's, a David Foster Wallace and a James Joyce.

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What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

LOL — I put in an entire chapter and then various sections of the chapter and got 5 different people — ranging from JK Rowling to James Joyce. Not sure I have a lot of faith in the reliability of this test.

Just out of curiosity, I looked on line and got this James Joyce excerpt:
Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.The program correctly identified it as Joyce.

I then trimmed it to: Buck frowned at the lather. He hopped down from his perch. Again, James Joyce.

And, then this The duck frowned at the lather. He hopped down from his perch. Again, James Joyce.

Now, IMHO, the second, edited version isn't at all in the same style as the first, and the third is just plain silly.

So, my theory of how this works: There's a large database of selections from the writings of many authors. This way, Joyce is recognized as Joyce, etc., even if it's only because of a simple word count (i.e., none of the other writer's in the data base use lather and perch in the same paragraph.) So your literary "style" simply means that in the excerpt you put in, the frequency of a few words matched the frquency of a few words in the larger sample of one of the authors in their base. Whooptedoo.
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Fiction is just like real life, only truer.

Feed this to the machine:

"lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch lather perch"

It's all about word choice, James Joyce.

Quite frankly, I can't think of a lean mean algorithm that can really discern writing style. Maybe it has the Gunning-Fog Index or one of its word-counting cousins plugged into the program, but unless it's part of a well-funded MIT research project on Artificial Intelligence, the algorithm will forever stay the brave little toaster that it is, just like its cousin - the MBTI writing analyser.

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Thank you for obtaining data to support my theory.

And simple word choice is such a silly way to try to categorize an author's "style" -- that way it depends on subject matter, so a fishing guide, The Old Man and The Sea, and Moby Dick all have the same "style."


Agreed! But I can think of a quick improvement on a simple perch-lather word counter. It would be very simple and straightforward to write.

Create a style profile based on the following (and I'd require a standardized, and significantly long and varied, writing-sample size: say, samples of at least 2,000 words and from at least 10 different works to make a total of 100,000 words).

* total number of different words used
* total number of words that are in a list of the 100 most commonly used English words.
* total number of words used that are not in a list of the 500 most commonly used English words
* average word length
* length of longest word
* number of words in each of several length categories: 1-3 letters, 4-6, etc.
* total number of commas, total of colons, total of semicolons, total of quotation marks, total of other punctuation marks
* number of times "said" is used
* number of occurrances of certain key words that imply complex sentences regardless of subject matter, such as therefore, and, but, thus, because, etc.
* total number of sentences
* average number of words per sentence
* length of longest sentence
* number of sentences in each of several length categories: 1-3 words, 4-6, etc.

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Fiction is just like real life, only truer.

I pasted the opening to Tale of Two Cities and got Edgar Allen Poe.

I pasted The Raven in and got HP Lovecraft.

:3.

Very good detective work Fern and crystaluni

Incidentally if you type 'dell latitude 420' 33 times, this is apparently very much like the style of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Quoth the raven, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Edgar Allan Poe is lovecraftian. I say EAP and HPL were spiritually joined at the hip. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that HPL was influenced by EAP.

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"Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me NOW!
It is fun to have fun
But you have to know how."
Dr. Seuss, The Cat in The Hat in the style of Stephanie Meyer

"And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more."
Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the style of James Fennimore Cooper.

"I do not like green eggs and ham I do not like them sam I am."
Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham in the style of Ernest Hemmingway.

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Fiction is just like real life, only truer.

That's one reason why I think the program already has included a word/letter/sentence counter.

Telegraphic writing = Ernest Hemmingway

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...Margaret Mitchell...

Now I have to read Gone With the Wind

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-(Fantastic! Everything is beautiful!)

The one that most consistently crops up for myself is David Foster Wallace. I've also had Charles Dickens and Isaac Asimov(?!), among others.

Well, it was never going to be that accurate was it? Seems like it'd have to be one hell of a complex piece of code to operate on anything other than a superficial level.

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We are beyond our own ability to define ourselves - we can only describe what we think we are.

Sadly, I think your post details the true merits of this test. It's good in theory and it would be excellent if they improved the quality of it. But in it's current form I don't think it's accurate enough for my liking. By the way, I apparently write like Stephen King.

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"It is a melancholy fact that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality." -Paul Johnson

INFP, 4w5 sx/sp

Mostly, I get David Foster Wallace and Margaret Mitchell, and my abandoned novel got Mitchell. Now that I think of it I guess my writing does resemble Mitchell's. Except it's fantasy, not romance. (I haven't read Infinite Jest or any of Wallace's books yet).

I got a whole bunch, though. Unsurprisingly, my message board posts tended to resemble science fiction authors and thriller writers. I got Cory Doctorow (never heard of him), Douglas Adams (yay !) and Dan Brown (ew! :S ) for these. The one I was happiest with was William Shakespeare (even though I thought the writing sample that got him was quite poor!!!)