Web toys: I write like who?

[graycardinal]

[Edited; the toy's blog-code isn't working, and I'm too lazy to redo the analyses to pull links.]

All right, this is interesting.

I tried the text two of my Yuletide stories, The Solitary Sorceress of Oz and Four Views of General Jinjur, on this Web-based writing-style analyzer, and got this back:

"You write like L. Frank Baum."

Now initially, I was impressed; Solitary Sorceress was written to sound as much like Baum as I could manage, and getting this result back for that story seemed remarkably perceptive.  But Four Views -- while it's still an Oz story -- is structured distinctly differently (for one thing, it's written in four different first-person POVs)...and so I was a little surprised to get the Baum result a second time.  What this suggests to me is that the analyzer is looking for vocabulary more than it is for style as such.  Let's try another piece....

Hmm.  The Tale of Marian's Wedding (a Robin Hood story, also originally a Yuletide entry, gets this:

"You write like William Shakespeare."

And my latest Yuletide contribution, River of Death, yields:

"You write like Dan Brown."

Uh-huh, definitely a vocabulary analyzer.  Most of Shakespeare's surviving text is verse and play-script, not prose, so while the engine's period sense is more or less right, its grammar-and-voice parser is off.  And it correctly pegs River of Death as a thriller, so Dan Brown is a plausible guess (the sandbox is actually Clive Cussler's).  Most of the other fic I fed this also showed up as "Dan Brown"...except for my Yuletide Arabian Nights story, which the analyzer tagged as like Douglas Adams, for what reason I'm not sure.

Interesting toy, but not as nifty as I was hoping for.

Comments

[twilight2000.livejournal.com]

Can't wait to see who I write like ;>

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

I think I'd rather be Baum than Joyce, but I didn't put a lot of thought into developing my own style.