Comments | joe_pike_junior: Maybe I should do a Carrie/House crossover

joe_pike_junior

Maybe I should do a Carrie/House crossover

Jul 14, 2010 21:16

A fledgling meme I got from pwcorgigirl:

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writing, house, sherlock holmes, meme & pop culture

Comments 7

pwcorgigirl July 14 2010, 14:07:30 UTC

I think it has to be looking for word matches too. It has to be using categories in a database, but the overall feeling and tone of writing really can't be confined to common word usage or parts of speech.

The three results you got are really quite flattering. :) At least you didn't come up as Dan Brown. I actually said "FUCK NO" when one of mine came up as his!

joe_pike_junior July 14 2010, 14:20:00 UTC

Yes, that story wasn't really written like Conan Doyle at all (or maybe like Conan Doyle after he got a knock on the head). I would love to feed my writing through an intelligent engine that analysed thing like sentence length and tone, but that would be a lot harder. I guess you could work out if the writing was positive or negative overall.

At least you didn't come up as Dan Brown. I actually said "FUCK NO" when one of mine came up as his!
That would be my reaction, too. Can you believe I've read two of his books? One wasn't enough to convince me. Or maybe I'm just a masochist.

pwcorgigirl July 14 2010, 14:31:52 UTC

I've heard several people whose sense of taste and intelligence I admire say they picked up a couple of his books just to see what the hoopla was about.

A couple of years ago, two earnest young street missionaries came up to me while I was getting a soda from a vending machine and gave me a tract about how we shouldn't read Dan Brown. I thanked them and said I'd be happy to help their cause. :D

topaz_eyes July 14 2010, 15:56:08 UTC

On the bright side, you're showing Dan Brown how it's done right...

topaz_eyes July 14 2010, 15:59:29 UTC

Is writing style something that can be pinned down? Word choice is one thing, but it's how you string them together, rhythm, tone... Which makes this meme absurdly funny. Or maybe funnily absurd. Or both. *g*

joe_pike_junior July 14 2010, 16:03:05 UTC

Doing this made me think about that. I decided that you'd be able to at least make some sort of primitive measure of style by measuring sentence length, number of descriptive words... I guess you could develop a tool that measured your "Hemingwayness" versus your "Austenness", for example.

This meme is amusing. :D

nomad1328 July 15 2010, 01:39:35 UTC

Not bad... Did you ever read Stephen King's "On Writing?" It's a good read. Mostly, if I recall correctly, about not overdoing it. I like his writing- it's simple enough to be easy to read, yet not Dan Brown... not that I've ever actually read Dan Brown. Let's say it's not Stephanie Meyers. Is that an adequate comparison? I was coerced into reading Twilight once. I did this meme and got Nabokov (never read it), JK Rowling (really?? read the 1st one), and Chuck Paluhniak (never read it). I gotta start writing again...