Bored? Frustrated?

Check out the I Write Like website.

It’s simple. Cut and paste in some text you’ve written, press the button and Bingo!, it tells you which famous writer your work emulates.

Only problem is, it can’t make its mind up.

Having cut and pasted in various passages from this my own site, I discover that depending on my mood I write like all of the following (all men at least):

  • Kurt Vonnegut
  • Edgar Allen Poe
  • Arthur Conan Doyle
  • David Foster Wallace
  • Dan Brown

In fact, if you paste in a longer passage and get a result, then cut out some of the sentences from the same passage you can get a quite different result.

Anyway, this passage shows my inner Dan Brown hard at work:

The small group of Givers had their divisions, with arguments around their relative contributions and how they should be weighed. In total cash terms the UK of course stood to give far more than eg the Netherlands, but in terms of contributions per capita the Dutch were paying notably more than the Brits.

Whereas this reveals my latent David Foster Wallace:

It was clear from the outset to anyone in the know (a) that there would be an increased EU budget, and (b) that those who Give and not those who Get would determine just how much bigger.

Since the large number of EU member states wanting to Get were in a relatively weak position, they had to make a vast amount of noise to try to intimidate those who Give into being more generous.

Enough. And in any case, those people write like me.

Time to take the dog for a walk.