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There's a fun little webtoy at http://iwl.me/ where you cut and paste in a block of something you wrote, and it analyzes it, and tells you who you write like.
I believe that Cory Doctorow used that once and discovered that he wrote like Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman took it, and I think he came out with Stephen King. But they didn't get King to try it.
Me, I just plugged in my last sixteen posts and got David Foster Wallace three times, H.P. Lovecraft twice, Cory Doctorow five times, Arthur C. Clarke, Dan Brown, James Joyce, William Gibson, Isaac Asimov, Jack London...
The person who had been talking about this earlier had mentioned that it said that her poetry is like Rudyard Kipling's. So I was curious.
I copy-pasted in "If-" by Rudyard Kipling, and found out that Kipling writes like Mark Twain. After c&p'ing in the first bit of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County", I discovered that Mark Twain, however, writes like William Gibson.
William Gibson may have written like William Gibson when he was writing NEUROMANCER, but, as of ZERO HISTORY, he writes like Cory Doctorow.
Looking at his review of the WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE novel, we discover that Cory Doctorow writes like Chuck Palahniuk.
And that's as far as I've gone.
But my point is -- if someone has used computer analysis of writing style to demonstrate that Shakespeare is the Earl of Oxford, or the Bible was written by Gilgamesh, or everything Paul McCartney wrote since 1963 was actually written by Stephen Fry, I'm really not particularly impressed.
(... but the McCartney/Fry one is probably true, anyway. I mean, Fry must have been a fairly precocious child, so he probably COULD write by the time he was six, right?)
I believe that Cory Doctorow used that once and discovered that he wrote like Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman took it, and I think he came out with Stephen King. But they didn't get King to try it.
Me, I just plugged in my last sixteen posts and got David Foster Wallace three times, H.P. Lovecraft twice, Cory Doctorow five times, Arthur C. Clarke, Dan Brown, James Joyce, William Gibson, Isaac Asimov, Jack London...
The person who had been talking about this earlier had mentioned that it said that her poetry is like Rudyard Kipling's. So I was curious.
I copy-pasted in "If-" by Rudyard Kipling, and found out that Kipling writes like Mark Twain. After c&p'ing in the first bit of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County", I discovered that Mark Twain, however, writes like William Gibson.
William Gibson may have written like William Gibson when he was writing NEUROMANCER, but, as of ZERO HISTORY, he writes like Cory Doctorow.
Looking at his review of the WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE novel, we discover that Cory Doctorow writes like Chuck Palahniuk.
And that's as far as I've gone.
But my point is -- if someone has used computer analysis of writing style to demonstrate that Shakespeare is the Earl of Oxford, or the Bible was written by Gilgamesh, or everything Paul McCartney wrote since 1963 was actually written by Stephen Fry, I'm really not particularly impressed.
(... but the McCartney/Fry one is probably true, anyway. I mean, Fry must have been a fairly precocious child, so he probably COULD write by the time he was six, right?)