Results I trust!

One recent meme making the rounds on the Internet is the site “I write like…” I haven’t looked into the algorithm yet, but I’m not sure if I can. It isn’t obvious on the website what the statistical analysis entails. But of course, I was curious about my writing style. Some preliminary findings:

1) Repeated submissions with the same text results in the same author

2) Of the 12 samples I submitted (all from this blog), I got the following results:

The Arthur Conan Doyle hit is an interesting one. It came from my post on James Patterson’s King Tut book. Part of the algorithm must account for theme/genre, probably based upon a concordance. There’s no reason to think that I changed my style so much when I wrote about crime. The algorithm might have narrowed the field down using certain keywords, and then selected an author.

What I write here are essays. I’m not sure what it means to bear similarities to (mostly) fiction authors.

I am mildly insulted by the HP Lovecraft: perhaps that post rambled and didn’t come to a point?

All in all, a nice bit of fun.

Update: It turns out I was on the right track regarding “keywords”. Here’s a report from the Huffington Post, which contains a few words from the author of I Write Like.