I write like... · 6:33pm Aug 17th, 2013
The text analyzer at I Write Like says I write like:
Behind the Scenes: Vladimir Nabokov (um, thanks, but I don't think so)
Big Mac Reads Something Purple: James Joyce (?)
Burning Man Brony: William Gibson
- First 5 chapters of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Edgar Allen Poe
Changeling Dream: J. R. R. Tolkien (???)
Corpse Bride: J. R. R. Tolkien (?)
The Detective and the Magician chapters (Holmes/Trixie, written in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle):
1. Arthur Conan Doyle
2. J. K. Rowling
3. Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Ian Fleming
5. Ian Fleming
6. Arthur Conan Doyle
7. Arthur Conan Doyle
8. Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Arthur Conan Doyle
10. Arthur Conan Doyle
11. Arthur Conan Doyle
Fluttershy's Night Out:
1. Neil Gaiman
2. George Orwell
3. Neil Gaiman
Friends, With Occasional Magic: Chuck Palahniuk
Long Distance: Leo Tolstoy
Mortality Report: J. K. Rowling
Moving On chapters:
1. Neil Gaiman
2. Dan Brown
3. William Gibson
4. Chuck Palahniuk
5. J. K. Rowling
6. J. K. Rowling
7. J. K. Rowling
Pony Tales:
1. Happy Thoughts: J. R. R. Tolkien (wrong)
2. Mare of the Rings (Tolkien parody): J. R. R. Tolkien
3. The Green Hills of Equestria (a Hemingway parody): Stephen King
- Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa: Rudyard Kipling
4. Shipping Costs (comedy): James Joyce (?)
5. No Regrets (sad): Chuck Palahniuk (okay, it's a fair cop)
6. The Pony Side (Star Wars parody): Cory Doctorow
7. Twenty-One (comedy): Chuck Palahniuk
8. Game of Immortals: Oscar Wilde (ooh, nice catch!)
9. The Pony (Edgar Allen Poe parody): J. R. R. Tolkien
- Poe's "The Raven": William Shakespeare
10. Sombra's Curse (comic horror): H. P. Lovecraft (also a fair cop)
11. The Ones who Walk Away from Equestria: J. R. R. Tolkien (kinda sorta)
The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade:
1. Neil Gaiman
2. Stephanie Meyer — dammit, this thing is obviously broken!
Severus Spike: J. K. Rowling (well, I should hope so!)
Sisters:
1. Socks!: J. K. Rowling
2. Betting the Moon: J. K. Rowling
Trust: Ian Fleming
Twenty Minutes:
1. Ian Fleming
2. Harry Harrison
Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy: Dan Brown (karma's a bitch!)
Looks like I need to read something by Ian Fleming. For comparison, some well-known and stylistically distinctive stories:
Αλεκτρονα: (James Joyce homage): Gertrude Stein (?!?)
Eternal, chapter 2: Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind, interesting)
Mort Takes a Holiday (Terry Pratchett ponified): Arthur C. Clarke (wrong wrong wrong)
Pagliacci, chapter 2: Neil Gaiman (I don't think so)
Starlight Over Detrot, chapter 1: Neil Gaiman (wrong!)
And some off New Stories:
Kyles Pony Adventures: "Kyle Silverfall is a five foot six-inch tall crux with dark blue fur, with light blue on his stripes and markings, Blue eyes and brown blond hair . He wore a long black coat with several layers of light clothing under it, he also had black bracers on his arms also jeans for pants. He almost looked like a dark prince but in reality he was a Demon hunter along with his team, Gervak an orange skinned land shark, Kiya a Vixen who is crazy, Devon a purple sergal who also happens to be part demon and werewolf, And lest Hebi a green scaled Naga.":
Kurt Vonnegut
pixel the YouTube Pony: "OK lets make one thing clear! When i said story of my life i met story of my life. I will try to tell in detail every second i lived now that's clear. Lets start from the beginning. The day i was born.":
Neil Gaiman
I don't think this analyzer knows very many writers.
How about you? Post your own results.
This is entertaining. Thanks for the heads up.
I got Dan Brown for one of my stories. Huh. Might have to do this again. This is fun
Hilarious.
I analyzed my writing. Every time I wasn't trying to write in a different style from my norm, I got Chuck Palhuniak.
I think I need to read some of his work...
Ooh, this looks like fun!
Going Up: J.R.R. Tolkien
Letters from a Senior to a Junior Changeling: H.P. Lovecraft
The Showmare's Tale: Ian Flemming
The Princess and the Rose: Anne Rice
And just for fun, let's see what it does with an alliterative poem...
The Fall of Discord: J.R.R. Tolkien
All in all, it's an amusing little tool, but I'm not putting much stock in it. Some of the answers make sense (Tolkien influences in my writing, who knew?), but I defy anyone to point to a single point of similarity between anything I've ever written and Anne Rice's oeuvre--at least, besides sharing a common language. To be fair, I've only read a couple of her vampire novels, but come on.
That is really quite funny. In particular it seemed to like calling you Neil Gaiman and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Why is Stephanie Meyer even in that, you can't really call what she does writing, can you?
1291443 "Detective and the Magician" is a Holmes story. I'm very pleased that it got Doyle for those chapters; I was trying to imitate him.
Alfred Wright In Equestria:
Prologue -David Foster Wallace
Ch. 1 -H.P. Lovecraft (HAW!)
Ch. 2 -Vladimir Nabokov
Am I the only person that gets David Foster Wallace? Weird.
1291490 I'd guess you got Lovecraft for using words like "veritable" and "repast", and starting sentences with "While" and "As such". Thought that could have also gotten you Doyle.
Apparently I write like Tolkien when I pull things out of my rear.
Thanks for the site, Bad Horse, may many evil things arise from this.
1291495 You wouldn't believe how many times I've edited out an 'as such' because I had just used it. It seems to be my go-to phrase.
i1334.photobucket.com/albums/w642/Bombardement/rndm/modernism_zpsc973c14d.png
A Canterlot Carol -- Douglas Addams.
Good!
Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea -- Anne Rice
Less good!
Whom the Princesses Would Destroy...
Ch1 -- Neil Gaiman
Ch2 -- Cory Doctorow
Ch3 -- James Joyce
Ch4 -- James Joyce
Good! Also confusing!
Unreleased Yet Finished Civil Service Story #1 -- H.P. Lovecraft
Good. Wrong, but good.
Unreleased Yet Finished Civil Service Story #2 -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Good. Confusing.
Unreleased And Unfinished Civil Service Story #3 -- H.P. Lovecraft
Good. Very confusing.
So I apparently suffer from an advanced state of writerly disassociated identity disorder. That, or the classifier isn't very good at all.
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1291687 1291338 I guess I have to read some Anne Rice.
H. P. Lovecraft seems to be its model for "early 20th-century upper-class".
Entanglement: Pretty even split between Arthur C. Clarke and J.K. Rowling, with a dash of Cory Doctorow (for flavor)
...Yeah, I don't think that this thing is very accurate, either.
Fluttershy's Birthday - J. R. R. Tolkien Is it because the characters go for a walk?
Precious Gem - J. R. R. Tolkien Makes sense, because it's about a dragon, right? That, or Tolkien is the default result.
Historical Fiction - H. P. Lovecraft Wha?!?
Circuitous Scholarship - Margaret Atwood I think that made me happy.
Ten Seconds - J. R. R. Tolkien This story made about as much sense to the software as it did to the people who have read it.
Property of West Wind (20 chapters) - Neil Gaiman, Rudyard Kipling (4), Stephen King (6), J. D. Salinger (6), J. R. R. Tolkien (2), Douglas Addams. This all makes sense for various reasons, even the lone Addams one.
The Flower Girls - Neil Gaiman This story is only half finished, but the result makes me very happy.
Thanks for the pointer to this fun time waster!
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One of my favorites and
1291687 (Since I figure you'll be interested)
"The Amazingly Awesome Adventures of Tank the Tortoise (by R. Dash)"
1. P.G. Wodehouse / Oscar Wilde
2. Chuck Palahniuk / J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Chuck Palahniuk / Dan Brown
4. Chuck Palahniuk / William Shakespeare
5. Chuck Palahniuk / Neil Gaiman
6. Chuck Palahniuk / Dan Brown
7. P.G. Wodehouse / Harry Harrison
8. P.G. Wodehouse / Lewis Carroll
"Purple Prose, or A Night at the Clopera"
1. J.K. Rowling
2. J.K. Rowling
"A Filly's Guide to Not Making Headlines"
1. H.P. Lovecraft
2. H.P. Lovecraft
3. Leo Tolstoy
"Princess Luna Likes Coffee"
1. William Shakespeare
Bell, Book & Candle
1. George Orwell
2. George Orwell
3. Margaret Mitchell
What I find most interesting in all these is that the thing seems to pick up the style changes I'm aware of within my own stories, and that everything I've published comes out different. That's not terribly unexpected. I do think my five published pieces (non-trollfic, anyway) are stylistically distinct. But what do I think about the style analyzer's choices?
I'm really happy with what it has to say about "Amazingly Awesome Adventures". I split the analysis over my narrative and Rainbow's amateur writing, and the analyzer's results seem to come out pretty reasonably. There's some style difference in my writing at the beginning and end of the piece, and I think the Wodehouse / Palahniuk distinction there makes some sense. Rainbow's writing is intentionally (1) action-oriented and (2) all over the place, so the lack of style consistency and most of the authors chosen seem very reasonable there. William Shakespeare is a bit of an odd duck, but Rainbow is using some thees and thous in that particular segment. My first-person Luna story also uses those pronouns a bunch, and I suspect that the analyzer is just cued to use Bill S. for anything that does. Which is obviously dumb, but there you are.
"Clopera" coming out with J.K. Rowling is something else I like, and I tend to think of J.K. as being sort of like my normal style of writing (although it looks like Chuck Palahniuk might be closer). It gets both chapters of the story coming out the same, and that's probably what I like most. The pacing and style on this piece seems like a decent match for J.K. I think (though that might be wishful thinking), so I can kind of buy how this fell out.
I'm not too surprised that "Headlines" comes out looking a bit ugly, but again I'm a bit happy with the consistency that the thing is picking up. Chapters 1 and 2 are written from Rarity's fairly verbose perspective, and they both come out with H.P. Lovecraft. Chapter 3 switches to Twilight's perspective, which has a different kind of verbose to it, and it shows up as Leo Tolstoy instead. I don't know that I buy the matches that well, but I like that it comes out in a pretty rational way here.
"Bell, Book & Candle" is very much in progress, and I'm not too sure how I feel about its results. I'm also curious about their stability. It's the project I've focused the most attention on, and it has the most editing behind it. I've read Animal Farm and 1984, and Orwell never struck me as having much of a style to him, though that was all many years ago and I probably didn't have a great critical eye. Given the voice I use for Trixie, I was actually expecting Ch.3 to fall out with John Steinbeck. I've never read Gone with the Wind, but I can see that as another potential direction in which the dialogue could have pulled the analyzer. In any case, I'm not quite so sure about how it's reading this one.
All in all, I find myself a little more satisfied with the thing than I expected. I doubt it's all that good a judge of literary style matching—I don't know how much I believe any of the actual author choices—but it's recognizing conscious decisions I've made in my work like differences in character perspective and narrative style. So all in all, I think it's pretty cool.
1293159 Now I want to see "Princess Luna Likes Coffee" as written by William Shakespeare.
Oh man, awesome. I can't resist plugging in a bunch of freaky edge cases to see what it says.
My Harshwhinnial Chap. 1-3 (nigh unreadable trollfic) — David Foster Wallace
Chapter 12 (the one in which I switched styles and went fully lucid because the author gave the story to his sister to write) — still David Foster Wallace
One Knight Stand (NSFW!) (second-person clop) — Chuck Palahniuk
Melt (poem, adapting T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") — William Shakespeare
Princess Luna Picks Up Hitchhikers (first-person from Luna's POV):
Chapter 1 — Chuck Palahniuk
Chapter 2 — William Shakespeare
Chapter 3 — William Shakespeare
And as a control:
Fugue State (a story much closer to my default writing voice) — Stephenie Meyer
Oooh, IWL. Burn.
Could be worse. I could be David Foster Wallace, and the site could be comparing trollfics to me.
--
Edited to add: At least my (non-pony) Sherlock Holmes pastiche came up Arthur Conan Doyle.
Having not read any Palahniuk, I wish I knew what it was that was getting my stories matched up to him.
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Bradel, how'd you get two different author results for a single chapter?
I am fairly certain that it's doing some sort of mining for statistically significant words; that both Bradel's and my Luna stories go to Shakespeare is thus unsurprising if that's the only author they have old enough to be using thees, thous, and thys. What clinches it, I think, is Melt — which is not Shakespearean at all, but in its mere 1000 words does have a few Luna quotes. ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" itself came up Edgar Allan Poe.)
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On the theory that a high preponderance of words it couldn't find a dictionary match for was pushing a Joyce match, I pasted in "Jabberwocky" and it correctly identified Lewis Carroll. (Same with a randomly chosen chapter of "Alice in Wonderland.") Interesting that virtually nothing else pasted in so far has found a Carroll match. I suspect it's seeded with various famous texts that it compares against, though I have no idea what in the gibberish matched against Joyce and what their source Joyce texts are.
1293477 I originally plugged in the entire text of each chapter (and got identical results to the first column of names, except that the first chapter came out with Lewis Carroll), but I realized as I started writing up some thoughts on them that it wasn't really methodologically sound to do that. Every chapter of "Amazingly Awesome Adventures" has some Rainbow-perspective narrative written by me (the frame story), as well as some of the eponymous adventures written... well, by me, but imitating Dash doing some very amateur writing. NB that this was my idea of amateur writing when I got to this site, so even with me trying to make it bad, it's a damn spot better than "Dash Ketchum" and many other stories on this site. But it's consciously designed to sound like it's written in a different voice.
The first name associated with each chapter corresponds to the analyzer's read on my Rainbow-perspective frame story. The second name corresponds to the analyzer's output for the Rainbow-written portion of Tank's adventures.
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To be fair, the Joyce match for the text in the image I posted doesn't have anything to do with the text being gibberish. I tried three other nonsense texts after I posted my comment, and the analyzer gave me Stephen King for two of them and Kurt Vonnegut for the other one. I have no idea how the system determined these matches, but the Joyce result seems to have been a lucky shot.
So my emulation of Joyce wasn't better than Αλεκτρονα after all. :(
1291443 1291451 I was proud at having emulated the style of Conan Doyle so closely that it picked that style for many chapters. Now I realize all it did was notice the words Holmes and Watson. And if you type "Holmes Watson Holmes Watson" over and over again, it will say it is in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle.
1293456 I hate to break it to you... okay, I take a perverse delight in breaking it to you that if you paste that story into a text file, do a global search and replace of Holmes => Howard and Watson => Wilbert, it identifies it as being written in the style of Stephen King. If I do the same for my Holmes story, I get:
1. Cory Doctorow
3. Ian Fleming
6. Ian Fleming
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I'm too satisfied that this evidence reinforces my "statistically significant keywords" theory to be properly upset.
A little disappointed though that it doesn't have a more robust metric. We may have to wait for Friendly AI for that.
I think I'm seeing a pattern here.
EDIT: This is consistent even when I change names to gibberish.
EDIT2: "Anne Rice" changes to "JK Rowling" when I replace "castle" and "princess" with "house" and "president".
EDIT3: I tried putting in parts of programs I've written. I seem to get Cory Doctorow only for the files I consider well-written (and for all the files I consider well-written).