The "I write like" meme...

[seawasp]

... appears to me to be a random-answer generator, as it seems to have no consistency in it at all. It's certainly not doing any reasonable textual analysis.

Comments

[marydell.livejournal.com]

When I fed it some James Joyce it said James Joyce...I assumed it was looking at keywords or something like that.

[fireheart1974.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. I'd love to know how I write like "Dan Brown," who I've read and don't neccesarily think I sound like at all.

~T

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I got it to say Dan Brown with this:

"crucifix mountain scientist and the handsome foggy climbed archives raced"

It's all about the keywords. :)

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

It tended to think that my random blog posts were Stephen King, but my more formal writing was H.P. Lovecraft, or occasionally James Joyce.

Perhaps I need to de-convolute my sentences some.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I bet yours says you write like some guy named Ryk Spoor...

[pedanther]

There's a post by the device's creator here, if you're interested, although it doesn't go into a massive amount of detail; possibly the most telling revelation is that it's only got a small number of authors whose writing style it knows, which indubitably limits its ability to make good matches.

It doesn't say anything about keywords, but several people on my friendslist are convinced that's a factor. One reports that one of his pieces of writing was initially marked as "Arthur Conan Doyle", then changed to "P. G. Wodehouse" when the only alteration he made was to rename the central character from "Holmes" to "Jeeves".

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

I fed three different parts of a story into it. Each part came up with a different author. Interestingly, the Alien Space Bat story came up with Mark Twain, the romance came up Douglas Adams.

[othercat.livejournal.com]

It's looking at keywords. I fed it "Chrono Crusade fanfic, and it gave me Dan Brown. I fed it Kuroshitsuji/Black Jewels crossover, and it gave me Stephen King.

I don't write like either, by the way.

[gary-jordan.livejournal.com]

Hey! Next I fed it stories of ~1100 words, 11,000 words, and d triple that, and it said (for all of them) I write like James Joyce. Huh.

[rosencrantz23.livejournal.com]

via http://houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com/95712.html...

Jane Austen writes like Jane Austen
Henry James writes like Jane Austen
Nabokov writes like Nabokov
Norman Maclean writes like Defoe
Defoe writes like Shakespeare
Howard Kurtz writes like Stephen King (well, that could have been the content)
Sagan writes like Poe
Poe writes like Doyle
Doyle writes like Doyle

[wizwom.livejournal.com]

It seems to consistently come up with the same answer for the same piece of text.

Being BAD at analysis is very likely.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

It's gibberish.

Successive passages from the same continuous text yield insanely varying answers. The inconsistency is such that it is only even good for a joke once.

Bah and fhtagn to the lot of it!