I Write Like Website

[HeyAll]

Really cool website. But I do think they're blowing smoke a bit, lol

I put in one story I'm working on and it said I write like Anne Rice, which was a pleasent surpise because she's one of my all time favorites. Just an incredible writer and I'm not even in the same realm.

I put in another story and it said Agatha Christie, which made more sense to me because she uses a more simple structure.

Years ago, I had a sci-fi story (which I deleted) and a commentor compared me to a famous sci-fi writer that I never heard of, which was flattering.

 

[XerXesXu]

Just for kicks, I ran the stories from the six-story winter holidays anthology I'm reviewing for one last time now. Three of the stories came up Agatha Christie, two Arthur Clarke, and one Cory Doctorow.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out in the long run. The creators intended to feed in more data and more authors. One can see that it's detecting commonalities - but not so good at detecting idiosyncrasies. The former are common, the latter relatively rare, thus you need far larger datasets to detect the distinctive features of an author's prose.

I don't see this as ever being more than an amusement, but it's chilling to realise that already the CIA, Chinese or whoever, only need a sample of your writing to identify you from the rubbish you post on the internet. VPNs and onion routers are not enough.

 

[PennameWombat]

A few samples from various parts of one of my published works (70K words) all show up as Anne Rice. It involves aliens...

Two other of my published works posted in Erotic Horror both show up as Anne Rice as well. Good company, I guess.

Two stories I submitted in full (a 750 word entry and a 1500 word one) both also show up as Anne Rice... First is E&V (borderline, probably should've been NonErotic), second is Erotic Couplings.

I've never read any of Anne Rice's books although I've certainly heard of her. I've seen the Interview with a Vampire movie but that's as close as it gets.

Multiple snippets from my Geek Pride work in progress all show up as Stephen King.

Last check, one of my early published stories, absolutely no horror nor sci-fi elements explicit in the text (posted in E&V). Still shows up as... Stephen King. I've read much of his work but not quite sure the key factor in my work that's triggering this.

 

[XerXesXu]

I found this site to be a lot more accurate to my writing style.

Yes. Much more sophisticated. Something the CIA might use.

 

[LAHomedog]

Three excerpts and three authors...Anne Rice, Dan Brown and Theodor Geisel

So you like to solve biblical mysteries using vampires while eating green eggs and ham?

 

[PennameWombat]

I found this site to be a lot more accurate to my writing style.

Lucy Maud Montgomery... and John Muir! Ohhh kay... whatever you say, oh internet oracle of wisdom... I cannot say if they're any sort of reflection on my style as I've never read anything by either. Same with Willa Cather.

But, the couple of samples I submitted also had Philip K. Dick in the top five for me on both, and of the various authors listed on my top ten according to that site he's the only one I've read beyond maybe a short story or extract. I'd be proud to actually be like him but I'm not so sure.

And I'm the antipattern of Lord Byron and the Bard.

 

[LAHomedog]

A fun site. Thank you.

I submitted three and I write like Stephen King, Cory Doctorow, and James Joyce.

Alrighty then!

And I always thought I wrote like Robert Parker

 

[HeyAll]

A few samples from various parts of one of my published works (70K words) all show up as Anne Rice. It involves aliens...

Two other of my published works posted in Erotic Horror both show up as Anne Rice as well. Good company, I guess.

Two stories I submitted in full (a 750 word entry and a 1500 word one) both also show up as Anne Rice... First is E&V (borderline, probably should've been NonErotic), second is Erotic Couplings.

I've never read any of Anne Rice's books although I've certainly heard of her. I've seen the Interview with a Vampire movie but that's as close as it gets.

Multiple snippets from my Geek Pride work in progress all show up as Stephen King.

Last check, one of my early published stories, absolutely no horror nor sci-fi elements explicit in the text (posted in E&V). Still shows up as... Stephen King. I've read much of his work but not quite sure the key factor in my work that's triggering this.

Anne Rice is the master. That's why I was shocked to see comparisons to her being used so freely.

Except from, The Vampire Lestat:


IN THE WINTER OF MY TWENTY-FIRST YEAR, I WENT out alone on horseback to kill a pack of wolves.

This was on my father's land in the Auvergne in France, and these were the last decades before the French Revolution.

It was the worst winter that I could remember, and the wolves were stealing the sheep from our peasants and even running at night through the streets of the village.

These were bitter years for me. My father was the Marquis, and I was the seventh son and the youngest of the three who had lived to manhood. I had no claim to the tile or the land, and no prospects. Even in a rich family, it might have been that way for a younger boy, but our wealth had been used up long ago. My eldest brother, Augustin, who was the rightful heir to all we possessed, had spent his wife's small dowry as soon as he married her.

My father's castle, his estate, and the village nearby were my entire universe. And I'd been born restless—the dreamer, the angry one, the complainer. I wouldn't sit by the fire and talk of old wars and the days of the Sun King. History had no meaning for me.

But in this dim and old fashioned world, I had become the hunter. I brought in the pheasant, the venison, and the trout from the mountain streams—whatever was needed and could be got—to feed the family. It had become my life by this time—and one I shared with no one else—and it was a very good thing that I'd taken it up, because there were years when we might have actually starved to death.

 

[Jada59]

I found this site to be a lot more accurate to my writing style.

These were my top matches:

Lucy Maud Montgomery
Willa Cather
Stephen Crane
George Meredith
John Muir
Jean Webster
D. H. Lawrence
Jack London
Rudyard Kipling
Edith Wharton
Bertrand Russell
P. G. Wodehouse

 

[beachbum1958]

These were my top matches:

Lucy Maud Montgomery
Willa Cather
Stephen Crane
George Meredith
John Muir
Jean Webster
D. H. Lawrence
Jack London
Rudyard Kipling
Edith Wharton
Bertrand Russell
P. G. Wodehouse

I also tried this one, and got these top matches:
Rudyard Kipling
Stephen Crane
DH Lawrence
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Joseph Conrad
Philip K. Dick

 

[Jada59]

I also tried this one, and got these top matches:
Rudyard Kipling
Stephen Crane
DH Lawrence
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Joseph Conrad
Philip K. Dick

Interesting.

 

[TadOverdon]

I took some Hemingway and put it in; said he wrote like Stephen King...

The site is fucked.LOL

 

[JanusGoneAwry]

So you like to solve biblical mysteries using vampires while eating green eggs and ham?

That about sums me up.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

I found this site to be a lot more accurate to my writing style.

I tried this and my stories consistently came up as Philip K. Dick or Lucy Maud Montgomery and the antithesis of Lewis Carroll and Lord Byron. I didn't realize that Philip K. Dick wrote erotic romance stories ... but it did consistently put me in the same group of authors ...

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Let's see...

I write like...

Dan Brown
Vladimir Nabokov
Dan Brown
Cory Doctorow
Stephen King
Raymond Chandler

Dan Brown did come up twice. Yet depending on the story I used, it was different each time. Which leads me to believe it's just a random pick of an author name from a list of most likely candidates. Or, it's just plain random.

And I don't think I change my style with every story I write.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

These were my top matches:

Lucy Maud Montgomery
Willa Cather
Stephen Crane
George Meredith
John Muir
Jean Webster
D. H. Lawrence
Jack London
Rudyard Kipling
Edith Wharton
Bertrand Russell
P. G. Wodehouse

Hey, you stole my list from that sight. It was the same.

Now that was with one of my erotic stories.

Then I tried one of my sci-fi stories...

Lucy Maud Montgomery
John Muir
Winston Churchill
Samuel Pepys
Willa Cather
Stephen Crane
Upton Sinclair
William Butler Yeats
Arthur Conan Doyle
Philip K. Dick
Washington Irving
D. H. Lawrence
Rudyard Kipling
G.K. Chesterton
Jane Austen
John Stuart Mill
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sinclair Lewis
Louisa May Alcott
Joseph Conrad
Jean Webster
Theodore Roosevelt

 

[SimonDoom]

I found this site to be a lot more accurate to my writing style.

(edited to denote new/different/alternate site.)

I tried that one too, and got "Willa Cather" as the closest choice. On another sample it was Philip Dick.

But the correlation was only about .4, and it's impossible to know without more information what the significance of that is.

 

[TadOverdon]

I was curious enough about the site to try an anything-but-scientific experiment.

"Tad" is a collaboration that has seen turnover. So I pasted a couple of long segments from two of the earlier stories into the site. My involvement then was limited. It said that Tad wrote most like Stephen King.

I did the same with the book we're working on now, which is mostly my work, so far. I Write Like says that Tad has become Anne Rice.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Uhhh. No thanks. I can't see that ending well.

Suit yourself, but don't think that if you don't understand something, no one does. There are things I know I don't understand, but I wouldn't presume that you don't understand them either.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I submitted this short piece of mine to both sites. Melissa's gave me James Joyce; Alpha's gave me Stephen Crane, John Muir, Washington Irving, and Bertrand Russel as its top four. What do you think?

Blessé me Mither fer I have grinned. It’s bin a forthright of ages and aeons since me last confusion, end long I’ve bin led down the primrosest path tween devilfish and their deeperbluesea.

Yea, 13 times hath that audacious Ausustrian girl dared me heed the longpast participles of her audeamus et gaudeamus and risk readying meself for the sin and din of battled sexes reviberating in untolden measures of unfolden pleasures when thighs will be undone. And yes, me trice-holied Mither, it was meself who did the dark deeds in thought and word and meself alone who bends in blame while yet inflamed by her sways and bends. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxwellhouse cuppa, and by Java! By Joe! I’ll take her in tow to the theater’s back row at the end of the show to atone her with a very-firm-purpose of Amen-meant as we strive and scrive and shrive for a simultumultuous organum!

And what then, Mother-confessor, wouldst thou have of penisance from me, a most denoted pairisonher?

 

[JanusGoneAwry]

I wondered about the lack of many contemporary authors on the list from the Who-do-you-write-like blog and I found this on his other site https://mysocialbrain.org/

The writers in the list were selected to be both famous and prolific, with the latter helping to ensure that their style could be precisely estimated. However, you may note that most of them wrote more than half a century ago. This is because to measure their textual similarity we used text from Project Gutenberg, an organization devoted to digitizing public domain books and providing them free to the public. Since the vast majority of the books available from Project Gutenberg are in the public domain, relatively few recent writers are included.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I wondered about the lack of many contemporary authors on the list from the Who-do-you-write-like blog and I found this on his other site https://mysocialbrain.org/

That's the same site as AlphaLyon posted. It seems to have a limited list of authors for comparison, and many of us, apparently, write like John Muir, Bertrand Russel, and Stephen Crane.

 

[JanusGoneAwry]

That's the same site as AlphaLyon posted.

Yeah, but he has another site too where he publishes more information about the semantic engine that is used and about the extent of the source material. I checked it out for shits and grins and got similar results to everyone else. Namely archaic authors. FWIW I thought the author list was curious that's all.

 

[SimonDoom]

The problem is that the database seems to be limited. That must be the case if many of us are being told we write like Agatha Christie. I mean, come on. I don't need a program to tell me I write more like Agatha Christie or Stephen King than like William Shakespeare. If many of us are being told we write like Agatha Christie, we're not really being told anything meaningful.

It would be much more useful if the program eliminated all pre-1900 authors and included a much, much larger database of authors since 1950. I suppose the problem with that is that much of the material is copyrighted and perhaps that's an obstacle to including it in their database.

 

[lovecraft68]

Anne Rice

Fuck off website