I Write Like
July 9, 2010 by Dmitry
Introducing our latest creation — I Write Like. It’s an fun tool that analyzes your word choice and writing style, compares them to those of the famous writers, and tells you what writer you write like.
Just paste your writing (any text in English will do: your latest blog post, journal entry, Reddit comment, chapter of your unfinished book, etc.) and click “Analyze” to get a badge like this:
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Fun stuff! Can you tell us more about how the text is analyzed? What characteristics, etc?
Currently it analyzes vocabulary (use of words), number of words, commas, and semicolons in sentences, number of sentences with quotation marks and dashes (direct speech).
This is lots of fun! Is there a list anywhere of the possible authors?
I decided to keep it secret for now — I think it’s more fun this way. Currently it has 40 authors.
Okay, so this is fun, but why are all the writers men? There are zillions of equally awesome women writers out there. Most of the writers I matched on have written things I’ve enjoyed, but, seriously, where are the women?
If you need author suggestions, check the lists of Nobel, Pulitzer, Man-Booker, and National Book Award lists, to say nothing of the NY Times Best Seller lists and the contents of any college lit book.
FTR, I analyzed ten different stories I’ve written and it gave me back seven different authors, all male. Granted, I’m assuming you just don’t have any women in your database, but I seriously doubt my writing is more similar to 7 men’s than it is to a single woman’s.
Again, it’s a fun tool, but there’s a severe lack of equal representation happening.
What’s the ratio of female authors to male authors? I assume all the authors write in English, but did you include writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Chaim Potok who have a unique style of English writing that’s different from the UK and North America?
Lina, don’t jump to conclusions. There are women writers in the database (fewer than men, but they are there). Certainly, the program was not programmed to discriminate against women writers (it doesn’t even know the gender of the writer). Maybe it became self-aware and decided to be a sexist program, but in this case we have more urgent things to worry, i.e. save the world from robot invasion.
It would be awesome if you posted the writers list! You can still keep your analysis a secret.
William: Later ;-)
Apparently, E. Annie Proulx and DH Lawrence write like James Joyce. Haven’t tried running Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, or Alice Walker through the app, but the results should provide a howling robot invasion.
campylobacter : No writers you mentioned are in the database.
You should be a little more concerned with the parity of your list dealing with sex and race. Claiming that it is not important is more problematic than coding issues.
I would really like to know whose on the authors list, and what their stats are (comma usage, vocab, word count, etc.)
Also needs more women and PoC
In the event that you do decide to release the author list, you might also consider allowing the results to show how relevant the text is to each potential answer. I ran several of my pieces through the analyzer and got a mishmash of Palahniuk, King, and Brown, with blips of Atwood and Lovecraft. It’d be interesting to see if I’m really that diverse in my voices (I tried sports and gaming articles in addition to fiction) or if I’m something like 60% Fight Club and 40% The Stand.
Keving: Yes, I have planned to output probabilities with the results, but decided to keep it simple for now to release the app faster. I will may add this feature later. Thanks!
You do realise that a story by Marget Atwood comes up as being just like James Joyce? Atwood doesn’t write like Atwood?
Lulu: Don’t forget that I haven’t train the database on every work of authors. Probably, it was not trained on the story you tried. Also, I think writers don’t use the same words and the same style in all of their works, I don’t believe it’s possible :)
I already mailed this to Dmitry, and I’ll write back more once I get home from work, Dmitry, but for those of you who are curious about race/gender representation in the meme, I can show you what I’ve tried:
http://www.antagonia.net/blog/media/we-all-write-like-white-men/
It was mentioned above, but I would really love to see an expanded percentile view.
But it’s a fantastic parser. Can’t wait to see future versions, and can’t stop playing with it even now.
Excellent job.
I’m a semi-pro author, and I tried out excerpts from most of my stories. One set in Fascist Italy, with a smattering of Italian words, got Mario Puzo. Rural Kentucky: James Joyce. Two different off-world SF stories: Leo Tolstoy, though a peril-at-sea excerpt from one rated a Jack London. An alternative-future America: Stephen King.
For the first story I ever wrote (a retro-tech SF adventure), no matter what part of it I plugged in, the result was always Dan Brown!
Maybe it became self-aware and decided to be a sexist program, but in this case we have more urgent things to worry, i.e. save the world from robot invasion.
It’s not the program doing things on its own, it’s a combination of centuries of male-dominated publishing, and you deciding not to put more women writers into your program. I couldn’t really blame you for the latter, because of the former, but your dismissive answer when the problem was pointed out is pretty disgusting.
Anke: thanks for support. It was not a dismissive answer, I actually collecting users suggestions for authors to include in the next version on Twitter. Tweet with @codingrobots who you’d like to see.
Dmitry, Anke already said what I was going to type. It is absolutely dismissive to imply that pointing out that the data your app draws from is limited (and that the way in which it is limited is that is has very few women authors or authors of color) is the same as saying your program has developed self-aware sexism. Just because we’re geeking out on writing doesn’t mean folks who like your program are incapable of comprehending that any sexism inherent in it is due to how it was made, not some sci-fi malevolent sentience.
It is a very interesting project, though, and I look forward to seeing what pops up once you expand the database it draws from. (Especially since there are so many authors who aren’t white dudes who have a distinctive tone to their writing, like Agatha Christie, bell hooks, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, and so on.)
Kels: Agatha Christie is one of my favorite writers. She’s in the database.
wow, knee-jerk hotheads galore! none of you know the author set, so stop with the accusatory conclusions.
instead of attacking, i will say that it would be incredibly interesting to find ANY sort of gender-specific writing style. personally, i think our styles are more influenced by what we read than than our gender. my results certainly support that premise! (and happen to be a 50/50 mix of men and women) i’m going to do some side-by-side reading of each author, along with my own material, to see if i can see the similarities!
i think this is a fascinating program, dmitry. can’t wait to see how it evolves.
This is a fascinating piece. I just have one suggestion, that you post a disclaimer stating that fiction/writing that people submit to the analyzer is not to be copied/borrowed or stored to be used and that the authors maintain their ownership.
Preventative measures you know,
cheers
Dmitry, that’s fascinating. I haven’t seen her name come up at all while playing around with my own writing or when I inserted passages of her work. It really is interesting to see an algorithm being refined. :)
This is an interesting tool, and I’m glad you posted the criteria for analysis. But I’d like to know why you chose those specific criteria — are they just the easiest things to count? I’m a linguist with an interest in corpus linguistics, so I’d like to know how you made your choices and how you’re training the database on each author.
That whole sexism thing above made me wonder, could you detect gender differences using statistical analysis of writing style? There are plenty of people who seem to think that gender informs and controls everything that people do - a friend of mine that did a Music And Gender course was learning about how Mahler’s music was “gay”. I suppose this would be one way of trying to see if there really is a difference or whether it’s just doing humanities and philosophy making stuff up. If you could detect a statistically significant “signature” of a particular demographic, rather than just an individual author, it would be incredibly interesting. Although I’d wager you wouldn’t be able to see a difference at all.
(Incidentally, this post is “like” Dan Brown. I look forward to future versions with a wider database!)
Curie: I will post privacy policy on the site later today, but here you have my word that any text you post into IWL is not stored on server. Thank you!
Thanks Dmitry,
I’m glad you got it out there. Love this tool, have been passing it along and look forward to your espansions!
Dmitry: Why doesn’t this have every author ever published ever? Did you include the Bible so I can see if I write like God (eye roll). Where is the Sanskrit? Why do you hate women?
This is a fun consumer-level diversion that I’m sure is evolving. The premise is cool even if the comparison database is (necessarily) limited at this time. I’ll visit often to see how it comes along.
Thanks! It’s been fun comparing blog-posts to emails to more business-oriented writing.
Text analysis has been a long-running love of mine … any chance we could see the source (even if you keep the db private)? I love the application!
Keith, yes, the code will be opensourced later.
Thank you, Dmitry, for a very amusing site. Friends and I have had a lot of fun with it already, and I look forward to watching how it develops in future.
On the danger i might be annoying: As a student of computational lingustics i’d appreciate to see the code. So what are the plans about going open source?
Are the authors appropriate for elementary students? Or are they all adult authors?
@Donna: I’m not sure which authors are appropriate for elementary students, sorry. You can view the approximate authors list here.