Who?

Apparently I write like David Foster Wallace...

Say what?

Oh, that David Foster Wallace.

Er.
Cool.

Now you go play with "I write like"

h/t Chad - who apparently has dissociative writing disorder or something...

More like this

Hmm depending upon what I put in I get David Foster Wallace and Harry Harrison (fiction), Arthur Clarke (article about monkeys in space) and most disturbingly Kurt Vonnegut for allegedly funny article about bumping into Richard Dawkins in a thunderstorm.

Wow, it is hard to think of more disparate styles than Asimov and Joyce (at least ones that'd fit into a US based web form).

I tried different pieces of writing also:

a summary paragraph for a NASA proposal gave me A.C. Clarke.
That is good.

A sample paragraph from an intro to a highly cited paper game me Edgar Allan Poe.
Hmm...

I also get a mixture depending what text I enter. I seem to write papers like Arthur C. Clarke, which is a good thing. But the introduction to my most recent NASA proposal sounds like Douglas Adams, not necessarily a good result. I also fed in a referee report, which their analyzer identified as Dan Brown (since the authors aren't supposed to know who I am, getting a different result from my public writing is probably OK, but I should worry if I start writing papers/proposals like Brown).

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 16 Jul 2010 #permalink

Well, Edgar Allen Poe for my scientific writing (??)

But Chuck Palahniuk for a blog post I had last year...

I got David Foster Wallace with the first piece I submitted. I also got Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, and -egads!- Stephanie Meyer (ironically, for a critique I wrote of "Twilight").