Apparently, in at least one paragraph of one story, I Write Like Leo Tolstoy:
Also like Stephen King (?) and Daniel Defoe (??). Do these guys write at all like each other?
Subsequent paragraphs produced comparisons to Dan Brown (ew!), Charles Dickens (how?), and finally Kurt Vonnegut (okay, that one kind of makes sense). Do I not write like any women, or are there no women in their “famous author” database? Should I make anything of the fact that I apparently I change styles six times over the course of one piece?
Thanks to Tablet for the befuddlement.
How bizarre. Also, are David Foster Wallace and Stephen King at all alike? Because apparently I write like both of them…
The NYT published a funny response to this today: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/getting-the-not-quite-right-stuff-from-i-write-like/?hp
David Foster Wallace x 2 and James Joyce (at least I share his birthday). Was wondering whether there were *any* female authors in this database.. but surprisingly picked out Jane Austen and JK Rowling correctly (should prob have picked passages without the names "Bennet" and "Harry"…). And in case you're wondering, this paragraph reads like Jane Austen (p.s. remove "Bennet" and it's William Shakespeare, yes I'm sure he uses asterisks in his original text).