the iwl dot me gadget
So there's this fun thingy on the internets that tells you who you write like upon submission of a few paragraphs of your writing. I did so and got one author I didn't know of.
Being a scientist at heart, I knew one sample wouldn't suffice. So I submitted many different snippets from my various fics, and eventually, started submitting whole fics altogether. (Should I be afraid that the thingy steal my writing? I think not. Feel free to steal my fan works, dear.) While this is in no way 'rigorously scientific', I did my best to incorporate older and more recent fics, longer descriptive prose and clipped drabbles, and various chapters from a multi-chapter WIP I'm writing on another account. Each chapter got a different author, by the way.
Here are the results:
James Joyce (4)
Stephenie Meyer (2)
Cory Doctorow (2)
David Foster Wallace (2)
Stephen King
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke (for a Steven Spielberg's Avatar fic, the only non-ygo story of the bunch)
Dan Brown
Margaret Atwood (for the only horror story of the sample, interestingly enough)
Chuck Palahniuk (for a romance)
Most of these authors I've never read; some of them I had never heard about. I think it's interesting that a good portion of them seem to be science-fiction writers, and all the pieces I've submitted are slice of life, romance, drama, angst, coming of age.
Now being an ESL writer, which means I've been schooled in French literature and have very limited knowledge of English literature, I've had to wiki James Joyce (the great winner) in order to know more about him and more specifically, his writing style. Of course I know of the man, I've heard of him like anyone else; but I've never read any of his works. So this is the sentence I find most relevant to my interests amidst what wikipedia has to tell me about this great literary figure: Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
I wonder what the whole range of actual writers this test encompasses. And more crucially, why aren't there more female authors in the bundle of my results? Why do the genres not seem to match at all?
Being a scientist at heart, I knew one sample wouldn't suffice. So I submitted many different snippets from my various fics, and eventually, started submitting whole fics altogether. (Should I be afraid that the thingy steal my writing? I think not. Feel free to steal my fan works, dear.) While this is in no way 'rigorously scientific', I did my best to incorporate older and more recent fics, longer descriptive prose and clipped drabbles, and various chapters from a multi-chapter WIP I'm writing on another account. Each chapter got a different author, by the way.
Here are the results:
James Joyce (4)
Stephenie Meyer (2)
Cory Doctorow (2)
David Foster Wallace (2)
Stephen King
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke (for a Steven Spielberg's Avatar fic, the only non-ygo story of the bunch)
Dan Brown
Margaret Atwood (for the only horror story of the sample, interestingly enough)
Chuck Palahniuk (for a romance)
Most of these authors I've never read; some of them I had never heard about. I think it's interesting that a good portion of them seem to be science-fiction writers, and all the pieces I've submitted are slice of life, romance, drama, angst, coming of age.
Now being an ESL writer, which means I've been schooled in French literature and have very limited knowledge of English literature, I've had to wiki James Joyce (the great winner) in order to know more about him and more specifically, his writing style. Of course I know of the man, I've heard of him like anyone else; but I've never read any of his works. So this is the sentence I find most relevant to my interests amidst what wikipedia has to tell me about this great literary figure: Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
I wonder what the whole range of actual writers this test encompasses. And more crucially, why aren't there more female authors in the bundle of my results? Why do the genres not seem to match at all?