I write like…

Thanks to Elf Sternberg, I’ve caught the meme to analyze your writing style with the automated tool on the I Write Like website. Elf fed in a whole bunch of different stories and found that the tool gave different results based on what stories you feed into it.

I observed a similar effect. For example, if I feed in the first two chapters of FROST MOON, I write like David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest:

However, feed in FROST MOON chapters 3 and 4, and I become James Joyce, author of Ulysses:

How complimentary! (And apropos, given that Ulysses is one of the favorite books of Cinnamon Frost, a major character in the SKINDANCER books).

However, when I put in something completely different, like my science fiction story “Sibling Rivalry“, I get … perhaps unsurprisingly … something completely different:

I’m speechless. I think I will go out on that note.

No. That’s not quite honest. I have to do one more.

From the current draft of SPELLPUNK: HEX CODE, narrated by Cinnamon Frost, broken English and all:

Well. I still feel highly complimented: Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, is “among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award seven times, winning twice.” Wow. What company.

Not sure what that says when the most award winning author of recent memory was the best match for a chapter written entirely in broken English. Maybe … keep doing what I’m doing?

Or maybe, just maybe, don’t put too much stock into computer algorithms.

-the Centaur

UPDATE: thanks to the magic of comments, I’ve found the I Actually Write Like website, a “highly advanced statistical analysis tool which was actually genuinely written by a guy with a real PhD which has some statistics,” which gives this verdict on SPELLPUNK: HEX CODE:

NOW we’re talking! And STILL highly accurate! Let’s try FROST MOON again:

Even more accurate! Actually, since the Cinnamon Frost speech is like a lolcat, and FROST MOON is gothy, I strongly suspect a random number generator somewhere in there. 🙂 However (after a brief application of the scientific method) results seem to be consistent from run to run. That intertest reliability suggests a deterministic algorithm. HOWEVER (after a brief application of a sources of power analysis) extremely small changes to the text result … deleting the first word … result in completely different outcomes, so I suspect the text is being hashed into a fortune file. Changing the final word addition to the first word still shows this sensitivity to initial conditions, ruling out an analogue of the primacy effect caused by taking the head of the file.

Procrastination. It’s a wonderful thing.