So my brother has this writing style analyzer on his blog, and let's just say I got a bit carried away......
The problem is, it says I write like a bunch of people I've never heard of. It's not that this offends my ego (for real!), it's just that I have no frame of reference, so I don't know what to think of the results. It's quite annoying. I did get some famous authors, one of which made sense, and the other did not.
I pasted this story I did for a class, and it said I write like Ray Bradbury. I guess I can see that. But how about this: I pasted in my review of one of the Ideal Husband movies from this blog, and it said I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Now, I'd love to believe that's true, but I just don't see it in that review. I guess it has really long sentences.....?
Then I pasted in the prologue from a story I'm working on and it said I write like David Foster Wallace. Who is that? Apparently he's some kind of vaguely comedic well-reviewed person. One or two of his titles on Amazon look familiar.....
Most of my reviews from this blog came up as Cory Doctorow. I guess he writes sci-fi...? No idea. I assume the program just looks at sentence structure, maybe some word choices. Obviously not content.
Oh, well. I'll be going with this one:
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That Doctorow thing is an insult, ane-ue, far worse than it comparing me to Clarke. Doctorow is not only a transhumanist (i.e. a Russian Cosmist, except semi-literate and too rich to walk), but he's also an advocate of all kinds of idiotic policies RE:intellectual property.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, though I don't know much about Wallace's fiction or his views, he cannot have been all bad. Witness this:
I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems.
Pity he killed himself, I would've paid money to see him try to explain that to Joss Whedon.