I Write Like

According to I Write Like...

• "Wings Dancing in the Darkness" reads like Margaret Atwood
• "Every Little Thing" reads like Chuck Palahniuk
• "Delicately, Madly" reads like Charles Dickens
• "White Like Bone" reads like Anne Rice
• "Pyre" reads like Raymond Chandler
• "Dog in the Vineyard" reads like Dan Brown (...yuck)
• "Crush" reads like Chuck Palahniuk
• annnnd Remnants of Restoration reads like Kurt Vonnegut

Conclusion: either my writing is wildly inconsistent or the website's algorithm is, and I strongly suspected the latter...

...but then I discovered the source code for IWL is available online (eee) so I decided to poke at its innards for a bit and see what's what

( Lua sets up a local instance and installs shit: the liveblog! (terribly boring do not read) )

Once I had a local instance running, I decided to do some experiments for teh lulz (and perhaps tangentially teh science).

I cleaned out the authors included with the IWL download and used some fanfic authors instead: arbitrarily I chose myself, amielleon, and mark_asphodel (hello, unwitting volunteers! :D;;; ). I used the three latest fics by these three authors for training data, then took a few of the other works by each author to see how accurately IWL could guess the true author of a work:

( Data! )

...okay wow, based on that data, IWL seems to suck. Badly. As in, a-random-number-generator-could-do-a-better-job-for-anyone-not-named-Mark¹.

Time to look at the code and see what the methodology at play is...

• Analysis seems to be based on both "tokens" and "readability"


• The readability metric is just the Flesch Reading Ease score, which has been discussed here before as being a somewhat problematic and inconsistent metric


• Tokens is more unclear to me on this quick skim, but what I'm pretty sure is going on is: they're basically making a giant table of "words appearing in the text plus their frequencies," and based on that, they calculate a "rating" based on how the relative probability of those words is distributed (i.e. if A and B both use the words "obnoxious" and "teetotaler" a lot, the algorithm will notice that and assume A and B are more similar)

...so yeah, while the metrics IWL uses are better than a random number generator, they're still pretty unrigorous/underwhelming (quite possibly by design—I know I've seen this website pop up in my friends' circles more than once, and it does make a fun little two-minute time-waster when you first stumble upon it—it doesn't really need to be The Greatest Algorithm Evar ^TM to accomplish that).

( Footnote )