I Write Like

I don't what the voodoo algorithms are behind the I Write Like website. You paste in a sample of your writing and it "analyzes" the style and tells you what writer you write like.

I took a blog post that was pretty good and pasted it in. Rudyard Kipling. I cut all but a few sentences and did it again. Dan Brown. Then I used the middle section. Margaret Atwood. Section 4 got me Leo Tolstoy. On the fifth try, I pulled out the paragraph I liked and got Ernest Hemingway. That's where I stopped.

No one will object to having their writing compared to a famous author.

I write like
Ernest Hemingway

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Doing a bit of clicking on the site's blog turns up this explanation:

“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.”

Is their a lesson in style hiding in here? Or is it all just an interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of logic that enables reasoning with uncertain statements? Probably...