"I-Write-Like" site "errupts online, authors scratch heads" - (only 50 authors in the cache)

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100716/ap_en_ot/us_web_i_write_like

I Write Like erupts online, authors scratch heads

.... Though the site might seem the idle dalliance of an English professor on summer break, it was created by Dmitry Chestnykh, a 27-year-old Russian software programmer currently living in Montenegro. Though he speaks English reasonably well, it's his second language. ....

Chestnykh modeled the site on software for e-mail spam filters. This means that the site's text analysis is largely keyword based. Even if you write in short, declarative, Hemingwayesque sentences, its your word choice that may determine your comparison.

Most writers will tell you, though, that the most telling signs of influence come from punctuation, rhythm and structure. I Write Like does account for some elements of style by things such as number of words per sentence.

Chestnykh has uploaded works by about 50 authors — three books for each, he said. That, too, explains some of its shortcomings. Melville, for example, isn't in the system. ....

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:shrug:

I have NO earthly idea who he is and don't even feel like lifting a fingertip to Google or Wiki him. No doubt, I am probably offending somebody or scores of posters will be either scandalized at my ignorance or validated in their preconceived belief in my ignorance.

because his writing was all over the place stylistically and in terms of quality. If I gave you a copy of his long-novel Infinite Jest, his book of essays The Broom of the System and a collection of his journalism work all without covers you wouldn't believe the same person wrote all three.

Despite a deep catalog of experimental, absurdist writing which was exceedingly bright and optimistic in tone, Wallace was a lifelong sufferer of severe depression who committed suicide, seemingly without cause, just as his career was starting to take off.

I'd suggest reading Infinite Jest, it may be the best 1000pg. novel written in the last 20 years.

"I Write Like ___" program tells so many people he's the one for (many) them?!1

but I think a larger part of it was that those people are bad writers.

He was experimental as a writer, part of that was a belief that literature should not be linear in structure. (He liked to joke that readability was the only reason he didn't intentionally put words in the wrong sentence order. He liked footnotes because they interrupted the flow of reading...he meant them to be read as breaks in the narrative and some of the ones in Infinite Jest are utterly tangential and run pages in length.) Unless you're a pretty great writer, it's kind of hard to emulate any of that without writing badly. As my college creative writing professor told us, "rules exist for bad writers". Wallace didn't write within the rules, no matter what it was he was working on.

Also, a correction...A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again was the essay collection. Broom of the System was a novella. I get them confused because I read them back-to-back in one sitting one afternoon...neither one is very long.

I don't feel that I'm answering or explaining any of this very well. I've included two samples of his writing to show what I cannot. They're both journalism pieces so they're not as different as I'd like but I could not find a book excerpt for Infinite Jest.

I'll take all the heat for that one. It's the same answer I got from that website so I'll say I'm one of them even...if I was a good writer, I would be writing books instead of lecturing community center classes on creative writing and working in a bank.

through four separate submissions from three wildly different works, and I was quite pleased. Knew who he was. And while I may not be a famous writer, I know I'm a good enough one. So there.

I uploaded stuff by a variety of authors and it didn't think they wrote like themselves.

Never heard of him.