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“I write like … David Foster Wallace”

I came across a website last night that purports to "analyze" one's writing style and compares it to that of famous authors. Naturally, I was curious. After analyzing seven random blog posts, my writing style came out to be like that of Cory Doctorow (4 times), Kurt Vonnegut (2) and David Foster Wallace (1). "What, no woman writer?" I thought. I have read Vonnegut but not the other two. 

This morning while discussing the Analyzer at another blog, someone pointed me to this post on Obsidian Wings. In the comments section a reader mentions that the compiler of the gizmo uses a list of 40 authors, just three of them women. Margaret Atwood, J.K. Rowling and Jane Austen account for the female voices. (Further scrutiny shows that a few more women have been added)

Not satisfied with analyzing just my own posts I decided to run half a dozen or so posts and longish comments written by each of my co-bloggers. (You can tell I had a lot of time on my hands) Here is how they stacked up.

Sujatha: Shakespeare, Cory Doctorow, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King

Joe: Dan Brown, David Foster Wallace, Cory Doctorow, H.P. Lovecraft

Anna: H.P. Lovecraft, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut

Dean: Mary Shelly, Vladimir Nabokov, Dan Brown, H.P. Lovecraft

Andrew: David Foster Wallace, George Orwell, Cory Doctorow

Narayan: H.P. Lovecraft, Dan Brown, Vladimir Nabokov,

Prasad: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Swift, Cory Doctorow, William Gibson

It just so happens that the first seven posts of mine that I ran through the scrambler were all political posts. I went back and compared some book reviews and art posts and came up with James Joyce, Nabokov and George Orwell. (again, no woman)

Then of course, I did the obvious. Noticing that David Foster Wallace appears with alarming frequency in the Analyzer, I analyzed a piece of Wallace's own writing and apparently he writes like Stephen King!  Looks like Wallace and King are the two most frequently appearing authors in the results. I also plugged in a few of King's writing samples. Most of the time he comes out as himself. His "On Writing" musings resemble James Joyce. One piece (I forget which one) came out as David Foster Wallace (natch!). But in his old classic Salem's Lot, the Horror King apparently wrote like Chuck Palahniuk.  Go figure!

I am not the only one who spent a rainy day playing with this internet gimmick. Others, including some authors featured in the I Write Like analyzer were curious too. (Margaret Atwood writes like Stephen King, she found out). However, some among us are confident enough or vain enough to not need an online scrambler to tell them which famous author's literary style mirrors their own. Get ready for  Wilhemina from Wasilla.

Shakespalin

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10 responses to ““I write like … David Foster Wallace””

  1. Cyrus Hall

    Well, according to the this o’ so trustworthy site, my non-technical writing is similar to Mary Shelley or James Joyce, while my science apparently reads like Cory Doctorow or William Gibson (both somehow fitting). That sentence was like Cory Doctorow.
    I’ve read a moderate amount of Doctorow and find his style to be fairly bland compared to other writers I like. I have an active dislike for Gibson’s prose. When I have to write technically I often find myself getting rather bored, as such text often exists in an adjective and synonym free zone. It has improved my writing over all, no doubt, but I sometimes miss having my objects express something with intensity. Therefore it’s not a huge surprise it ends up like those two authors.
    This post is like Cory Doctorow (argh!).

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  2. Sujatha

    What? My writing isn’t like Jane Austen’s? I’m miffed, worse, prostrate with grief. I tried a bunch of my Fluff ‘n’ Stuff blog posts on the writing analyzer and got David Foster Wallace, Cory Doctorow, H.P.Lovecraft, Dan Brown, Lewis Carroll (on a post about matchmaking desis?!).
    (The above comment showed up as being like Cory Doctorow, whose books I have never read.)
    When I fed lines from Emma, it came up with You write like Jane Austen. I can use that to generate a ‘badge of honor’ embed code, and must content myself with artifice rather than honor.
    I tried lines from Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, and it informed me that he wrote like Dickens.
    What the dickens!

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  3. Dean C. Rowan

    This toy has been the topic of many recent posts and headlines. I refuse to visit it, but I’m pleased, Ruchira, that you “analyzed” it. I’m baffled as to what people mean, or think is meant, by the notion of writing “like” some other writer. Lots of nouns? Adverbs? Long-ish average sentence word counts? Sentence fragments? What about figures of speech or elaborate rhetorical conceits? A similar vocabulary? Writing–make that careful writing of the sort associated with good literature–is not a well understood phenomenon. One of the reasons is this propensity to parse it, and in so doing to disassemble it, rendering it something other than writing at exactly the point to which its exegesis pertains.
    However, I suspect most of us unthinkingly posting to blogs or rattling off comments do in fact write like Cory Doctorow. Just a gut feeling.

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  4. narayan

    Veeerrry interrresting! I put in five paragraphs of my only published story and got back James Joyce. One of the few persons I revere was an unaccredited Lovecraft expert. Don’t know Nabokov beyond Lolita. But Dan Brown? More later, I’m sure.

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  5. Ruchira

    Oh, Dean! You got all serious about this one. I was hoping you would play along.
    I have already wasted a vast amount of time on the Analyzer. But as one last acid test, I pasted a very technical paragraph from one of Sudhir’s immunology papers. Came out as “David Foster Wallace.” Yesss!

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  6. Joe

    Dan Brown! That hurts, Analyzer. Ideally I would have hoped for a Conrad. But on the results given, I’m going to assume that Andrew (Orwell) is the best writer at this blog.

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  7. Ruchira

    Hey Joe, I managed an Orwell too with one of my book reviews.

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  8. prasad

    I have a hunch the people behind this are going to announce in a bit how they’re picking authors at random. Or maybe they count the number of e’s in the text and use that to define the result…

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  9. jessica

    I got david Foster Wallace on three entries of my Dance related blog! This is simply ludicrous to me, when anything surrounding the life of the artist should maybe come up Hesse, I threw words like ‘crap’ out there enough that I would have appreciated a Vonnegut nod, and when I state that Voldemort will be covering the upcoming production of American Ballet Theater’s, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ I still come up DFW and not JK Rowling. I think the Analyzer is as up on literature as the average twilight reader.

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  10. jordan 11

    All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it. What do you think?

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