A new website called “I Write Like” measures your prose against famous writers.
The site was created by Coding Robots and the journal-writing software Memoires. The database is drawn from the Gutenberg Top 100 and Wikipedia’s list of bestselling books.
On July 14 one of the creators blogged: “I Write Like has been visited by 100,000 people yesterday. New tweets mentioning IWL are appearing every five seconds or so. “
Author Margaret Atwood discovered that she doesn’t write like herself.
I couldn’t help myself.
Like Oscar Wilde, I can resist anything except temptation.
I pasted in a bit of Marrakech is mopeds, mosques and massage and then pressed Submit and the answer came back : Stephen King.
Shocked by that, I pasted in a chunk of The massive Oranje influence of Johan Cruyff and the answer was David Foster Wallace.
I’ve heard of DFW but not read him.
Does it mean anything? No.
Is this it just another silly internet gimmick? Yes.
I told my wife about the website.
“Margaret Atwood tried it. She doesn’t write like herself,” I said.
Jan laughed.
“Who does she write like?”