Who do you write like?

If you're a writer you've probably been passed this link by now, a silly bot that takes a sample of your writing and tells you which famous author you are similar to:
https://www.codingrobots.com/iwl/b/e51188de

My result was Tolkien, which seemed pretty great except that, on reflection, since my sample had the word "dragon" in it about four or five times that was probably the only result I was likely to get.

This is amusing. I entered text from a book by Hamlin Garland; he apparently writes like Leo Tolstoy. And Willa Cather writes like Anne Rice!

Probably it's doing nothing more complex than looking for the appearance of certain words, which it has assigned across a relatively small list of notables. Still fun.

I apparently write like somebody I've never heard of: Chuck Palahniuk.
What? Fight Club? Now I'm worried.

I write like Raymond Chandler? Yay?

Pretty happy, I got Neil Gaiman (though I wonder what keywords it was picking up on?)

I don't know about this particular site and the metrics they are using. However, often they will use readily-available statistics such as the average sentence length and perhaps the "reading level" scores through a couple algorithms. Most of the time there is not a large enough sample provided to do real comparisons of vocabulary.

It is not the sort of thing one would use for any serious study but more of a fun blog-starter game.

For another take on this, one could see some interesting patterns if one strips away the words and looks at only the punctuation. Are some writers more prone to use semicolons and dashes than others? What about the number of commas compared with full-stop periods?

https://scribe.rip/creators-hub/what-i-learned-about-my-writing-by-seeing-only-t...

Real textual analysis requires careful work with writing samples that are consistent in form. Some techniques want you to "tokenize" proper names so they don't slant the results. For example if you were counting short words (e.g. 3-letters) and you had a protagonist named "Tom", that would tend to change things compared to another story by the same author about a character named "Larry" or "Bartholomew." It is also valuable to understand the methods well by making comparisons of texts where the authorship is strongly believed to be identified. If the proposed test (and there are many) doesn't confirm this, the test might not be good for this author. Once you have that figured out, then you can start to get into the interesting questions of who did this questionable text. But even then, it is just a bit more evidence, not conclusive.

James

I write like Vladimir Nabokov!
I love his writing. Here are some of his quotes ...
"In reading, one should notice and fondle details.”
“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”
“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

- Perhaps it picked up on my penchant for words, words, and more words. Love them!
This was fun!

I got Stephen King.