I Write, Like...

Sportswriter and voluminous blogger Joe Posnanski put some famous sports quotes through one of the latest memes-of-the-moment, the I Write Like site that will compare a sample of writing against a number of better-known authors and identify which of them the sample is most like. He was dubious as to its reliability. Although some of the quotes matched up with writers that were a lot like the person who originally said them, many did not.

The Ted Williams quote --  "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.'" -- suggested Ernest Hemingway according to the IWL algorithm, and Williams' he-man persona matches Hemingway's pretty well. There's the problem that Williams also said, "Know what you get when you pour hot water on a sportswriter? Instant (expletive referring to dung)," so he might not have appreciated comparison to any writing folks at all.

But on the other hand, a sample of quotes from pitcher Satchel Paige, one of the best sources of American wry in the 20th century, matches him to Twilight series author Stephenie Meyer, and that's enough to angry up the blood, fried foods or no. Muhammed Ali's famous "Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee. Your hands can't hit what your eyes can't see." is apparently the kind of thing that The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood would write, meaning that the IWL algorithm misunderstands the concept of the "Boxing Day" holiday celebrated in Atwood's native Canada.

Some samples of this blog, submitted to the IWL site, suggested different authors. Several read most like the late David Foster Wallace. I've never been able to get through more than a few pages of a Wallace novel, which may say something deeply profound about my relationship to own writing that I'm neither smart nor introspective enough to figure out. Another couple of samples suggest that I write like H.P. Lovecraft, and I don't follow that one at all. But then there was one submission that prompted IWL to suggest I write like The DaVinci Code author Dan Brown, and I am without comment, for "there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order."