Your Writing Is Terrible: You Write Like A Dead Person

I came across You Write Like, where you can input text that you’ve written, a form of necromancy passes through your hard drive, and you are assigned a literary doppelganger.

I input about a half-dozen bodies of text that I’ve done, from stories on here to a some paragraphs from my book. About four times I was compared to Mark Twain, while on the other two I got Nabokov. Then I became smartalecky and submitted text from a random paragraph generator, which resulted in Jane Austen all the five times I did it. Then I submitted some random Facebook status updates that I found on a site. Five out of six said they were Chuck Palahniuk.

Even though it smacks of those ubiquitous make-your-own-quizz stupidness that was the rage a few years ago, this seems to have more substance, even though the developers apparently think Austen was a schizophrenic and Palahniuk is a lovelorn teenage girl. I agree on the latter.

Anyone else get some interesting results?

11 Comments

  • The generator goes by keywords, and possibly marks — though I can’t fully say that for sure. When using a text with ghost, whisper, and blood I got S. King, but then one with more religious keywords I got Arthur C. Clarke.

  • Jay says:

    I assumed it analyzed writing style, which is something too complex for Javascript to do (I assume they used JS).

    That’s two assumptions so far, so I’m probably wrong.

  • Austin says:

    LOL here are some band lyric comparisons

    Rihanna- “Disturbia” = Bram Stoker

    The Devil Wears Prada- “Outnumbered”= Johnathan Swift

    Breaking Benjamin- “Crawl”=Chuck Palahniuk

    Charlie Daniels-“The Devil Went Down to Georgia”= Margaret Mitchell

    the Happy Birthday Song= Gertrude Stein (I tried different names, and it gave me random other results, but this one was the funniest because all I said was “Dear”)

    After Edmund-“Fighting For Your Heart”= Ray Bradbury

    Frank Sinatra-“My Way”= David Foster Wallace (????)

    Black Eyed Peas-“Meet Me Halfway”= Daniel Defoe

  • Jay says:

    Good idea with the lyrics. Never heard of Wallace either, if that’s what you were implying with the ???. He’s a pretty recent guy so that might be why.

  • Bobby says:

    I entered a short story of mine and according to this website I write like Leo Tolstoy.

  • Jay says:

    Nice. Care to share the story? I’d like to read…

  • Bobby says:

    Sent to your email…

  • Charlie says:

    I tried to submit some of my Facebook status and also some of
    my blog. The result that I got is that I write like James Joyce and Louis
    Stevenson. This is an interesting site and I really can’t imagine how its java
    script works.
     

  • Ruth Gates says:

    Your title “Your Writing is Terrible: You Write like a Dead Person” caught my attention. I have a friend. Her name is Maria Burch and she told me once that she gets frustrated every time her boss tells her that her writing is a crap. I felt sad for her.

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