"I Write Like" Website Tells You What Famous Author Writes like You

"I Write Like" is a new online site that compares your writing style with that of famous authors and tells you which author's writing is most like your writing.

The online analyzer is free to all users. To use, simply go to the site, paste a few paragraphs of your writing and click the "Analyze" button and in a few seconds another page will load with the name of the author whose writing style is closest to yours.

The results are in the form of a badge that can be added to other sites, like many Facebook applications do, in order to show the world (at least your part of it) and boast or have a laugh. The badge comes in the form of code for blogs, links for Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Tumblr or direct text links for friends.

Some of the authors being used include Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Chuck Palahniuk, Margaret Atwood, James Joycean, Dan Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, Mario Puzo, David Foster Wallace, William Shakespeare, among many other authors. So for, the creator has uploaded 3 books for each of the 50+ authors who are used to analyze your writing.

The Yahoo article, in which I first found out about "I Write Like", listed a few pieces of writing from a few famous people to see the results. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is similar to Stephen King, Obama's Oval Office speech in June is similar to David Foster Wallace and some LadyGaga lyrics are similar to William Shakespeare.

I thought I would try my hand at it and I entered a few of my stories into the analyzer and found some really strange results. Red Junction (a vampire story) is written in a style similar to that of Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club). Just a Dream (a romance story) is oddly similar to Stephen King. The White Wood shadows collaboration with a friend about vampires) is similar to H.P. Lovecraft, which is at least in the same ballpark. Pure at Heart (a werewolf story) is written in the style similar to Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code). Finally, to mix it up a bit, Obama Healthcare (an editorial/rant) is somehow similar to Mario Puzo (The Godfather) -- I really did not see that one coming (I'm sure my Republican readers did!).

So far, "I Write Like" is very inaccurate I think but it is a fun and novel idea. Maybe it will improve as more famous authors' works are incorporated into the mix.

Part of the inaccurate issues with "I Write Like" is that it does not take into account punctuation, rhythm and sentence structure but does consider some style elements, like sentence length.

"I Write Like" was created by 27-year-old Russian software programmer, Dmitry Chestnykh, owner of Coding Robots, which also programs blog editing and diary writing software. Chestnykh wanted it to be an educational thing and also to help people write better," he said.

"I Write Like" Uses an algorithm to reveal traces of writing similarities and is modeled after e-mail spam filter software to perform text analysis based on keywords and word choice. Due to the unexpected popularity with "I Write Like", Chestnykh is planning on improving the accuracy of the results by adding more books to the programming and a probability percentage to tell users how similar their writing is to the author.

Give "I Write Like" a try for fun but do not expect accurate results. As Chestnykh says "I think that people really like to know how they write, even if it's not accurate results. Still it's fun for them."

Source: Yahoo! News