I Write Like...

[AllenLowe]

tried it again. Came up as:

Chewey.

[papsrus]

David Foster Wallace here, too.

He apparently suffered from depression for 20 years and took his own life in 2008.

I'm going to resubmit something right quick.

[Van Basten II]

Most of my writing is in French, but the few boards entry i tried were DF Wallace, got two Raymond Chandler and another like Stephen King. What I fed the system were old boxing reports I used to write on UK sites

Edited July 17, 2010 by Van Basten II

[Shawn]

it says 3 paragraphs minimum I believe. I tried a couple different things I've written and got Mr Wallace both times.

[GA Russell]

I put in part of a letter I wrote to an old friend, and I got James Joyce!

[JSngry]

Ok, this is rich...

I found a David Foster Wallace commencement speech online here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

And pasted these three sequential paragraphs into the "tool":

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

So who is this writing like?

I write like

Ian Fleming

So fuck this bullshit!

[7/4]

Ok, this is rich...

I found a David Foster Wallace commencement speech online here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

And pasted these three sequential paragraphs into the "tool":

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

So who is this writing like?

I write like

Ian Fleming

So fuck this bullshit!

[GA Russell]

What? You mean you don't think I write like James Joyce?

[Dave James]

tried it again. Came up as:

Chewey.

I'm guessing what you submitted must have been all in caps and that at some point, it made reference to either a sammich or Lou Donaldson.

[Brownian Motion]

Information about the site-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/17/i-write-like-website-goes_n_650037.html

[Matthew]

I came out a writing like Leo Tolstoy. Which you can easily see...

[papsrus]

Ah-HA!

Though the site might seem the idle dalliance of an English professor on summer break, it was created by Dmitry Chestnykh, a 27-year-old Russian software programmer currently living in Montenegro. Though he speaks English reasonably well, it's his second language.

[Jazzmoose]

I assumed it was created by the David Foster Wallace fan club.

[jazzbo]

James Joyce

I pasted in an excerpt of Henry Miller's writing. Turns out he writes like William Shakespeare!

[Spontooneous]

I pasted in some quotes from Bird and it said I write like Sonny Stitt.

[Shawn]

I pasted in some quotes from Bird and it said I write like Sonny Stitt.

[7/4]

James Joyce

I pasted in an excerpt of Henry Miller's writing. Turns out he writes like William Shakespeare!

Of course...great minds think alike.

[BruceH]

Ah-HA!

Though the site might seem the idle dalliance of an English professor on summer break, it was created by Dmitry Chestnykh, a 27-year-old Russian software programmer currently living in Montenegro. Though he speaks English reasonably well, it's his second language.

I assumed it was created by the David Foster Wallace fan club.

I pasted in some quotes from Bird and it said I write like Sonny Stitt.

Triple-HA!

[Randy Twizzle]

Kurt Vonnegut, a writer ...who never interested me but was a favorite of my brother when he was an undergraduate

[AllenLowe]

mine came out as God (I guess I have a biblical style).

[Hot Ptah]

For fun, I typed in Sun Ra's poem "Cosmic Equation". It said that the passage was like Dan Brown.

I posted several of my passages of writing. Different names popped up (including Leo Tolstoy once--I should have quit there). The name which comes up repeatedly is Cory Doctorow.

[Brad]

I put in one of my posts and it said I write like Nabokov. I wish!

[Ted O'Reilly]

I put in one of my posts and it said I write like Nabokov. I wish!

I got a David Foster Wallace for a CD review. Then, for some album liner notes I wrote, I got a Nabokov! But I couldn't trick it: putting in the CD review again, I returned to my David Foster Wallace style.

I'm going to have to read something by him, to find where my approach comes from...