I Write Like Who??!

I saw an article on cnn.com last week that analyzes your writing and tells you which famous author you write like. It’s called I Write Like …

The deal is, you paste a paragraph or two of something you’ve written onto the page and click “enter,” and it gives you the name of a famous author your work is supposed to resemble. The creator of the page is apparently some computer guy from Russia. He doesn’t make any claims about the accuracy of the results - it’s supposed to be fun and in its own strange way it is.

I’ve taken bits of pieces from this blog and gotten results saying I write like Kurt Vonnegut, H.P. Lovecraft and Steven King, among others. I don’t seem to write like John Irving or Philip Roth, which is unfortunate. Does that mean I’m versatile, inconsistent or just hard to pin down?

I entered bits and pieces from a few other blogs I follow into one window and gotten back James Joyce’s style. Does that mean that anything disjointed should be interpreted as Joyceian?

I wonder what would happen if I entered something by a famous author - like say, John Irving. Would it say that John Irving writes like John Irving?

Maybe the next step would be a site with voice-recognition capabilities that would tell you who you speak like. Would you rather be an Obama or a Palin? MLK or Malcolm X? Kennedy or Reagan? I can see (or hear) it now.