Word Nerd

Sometimes a thing comes along that you can't ignore, and you must share. Sometimes that thing is an ultrasound or a Star Wars t-shirt. But sometimes that thing has nothing to do with babies, and instead has everything to do with being a nerd of the highest order.

I Write Like is a site that purports to analyze a sample of your writing and tell you what famous author, within a finite subset, you write like. This hits the sweet spot for the kinds of things I geek out for.

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a subject to discover hidden truth? Check. The written word? Check. Telling me that my writing is most like William Gibson, sci-fi author and futurist who coined the term "cyberspace"? Double-super-check-check!

This is the sort of thing I could waste a good chunk of the day doing. I've already pasted various writing samples of mine into the engine, and I only discovered it 10 minutes ago. I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, but most of my blog posts shoved into the analyzer give me the same result of William Gibson. When I throw in a few articles I've written for business magazines, I get David Foster Wallace, which ain't too shabby either (may he rest in peace).

As a lark, I threw in various passages from some non-fiction my dad has been writing. (Dad, I know you'll try it anyway, but I couldn't help myself.) No matter what passage I chose, I got the same result: H.P. Lovecraft. I wouldn't qualify my father's writing as cosmic horror, but this is mostly about sentence structure and word choice. Maybe you should try to write some horror short stories, Dad. Apparently, it could work for you.

Not to get too meta on you, but I just pasted the text from this post into the engine, and I get David Foster Wallace again. Whee, this is fun! Go ahead, post your own writing into the engine and let me know what you get!