I heard about this site on NPR last week and was excited to check it out. Basically, you copy and paste in a writing sample and it tells you what famous author you write like. This excerpt from an interview with the site's creator explains how it works.
Actually, the algorithm is not a rocket science, and you can find it on every computer today. It’s a Bayesian classifier, which is widely used to fight spam on the Internet. Take for example the “Mark as spam” button in Gmail or Outlook. When you receive a message that you think is spam, you click this button, and the internal database gets trained to recognize future messages similar to this one as spam. This is basically how “I Write Like” works on my side: I feed it with “Frankenstein” and tell it, “This is Mary Shelley. Recognize works similar to this as Mary Shelley.” Of course, the algorithm is slightly different from the one used to detect spam, because it takes into account more stylistic features of the text, such as the number of words in sentences, the number of commas, semicolons, and whether the sentence is a direct speech or a quotation.
I tried several writing samples - blog entries, emails, articles I'd written for scientific journals. Apparently, I write like Cory Doctorow.
I have to admit, I wasn't familiar with him. But after doing a little research, I can see why we might have a similar style. He's a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger. You can read more about him here.
I'm not sure how accurate this is, but it's fun. Give it a try and let me know who you write like!
