I Write Like . . .

I'm green with envy! I seldom read more than one or two books by the same author. I honestly feel that most writers have only one book in them and constantly rewrite it. Atwood is an exception. I have read many of her books.

Your heirs can look forward to the royalties as the BBC and PBS run dramatizations of your work. Make certain you set up your will to benefit them.

I had to look up Karl May. What a character! I would guess your writing includes the fantastic.

I didn't like Miller's style. It was rambling almost like a reality TV show except in text. Most of my readings were in adventure like Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Agatha Christie, tons of comics, Ayn Rand which were strile in terms of personality but high on polemics but this is what appealed to me as a kid. It is almost like lawyers and political revolutionaries arguing. It brought out something in me - the thinking part. I also felt in her works a very static atmosphere and unrealistic scenarios almost like stages in a theatre but with puppet characters. I never read any romance books. We had Charles Dickens and Shakespeare in high school and the usual college stuff with Ernest Hemingway. Never read 'Catcher in the Rye' but lately read summaries of it.

As I grew older I began to break away as I felt there was an element of indoctrination and unrealistic scenarios. Ifelt she was rather deficient in history, science and social sciences.

I got 'David FosterWallace' from my reply to plainoldme above.

Mine came up Dan Brown this time.

I never read Dan Brown but enjoyed the Da Vinci movie with Tom Hanks. I read 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' so It was quite entertaining. According to 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' Queen Elizabeth is a descendent of Jesus from the Plantagenet line which descended from the Merovingian line in France.

I never read Dan Brown, with the exception of the first two and the last two pages of the Da Vinci Code, which seems to be related to that Chicago football team, Da Bears.

I think that Mr. and Mrs. Brown provided us with a satire in the Da Vinci code. The subject matter of that book is very popular in France.

Someone once wrote that James Jones' (author of From Here to Eternity) sentences "slug on like cement (I am cursed with a memory that supplies me with this stuff). From the little I read, I thought Dan Brown's sentences slugged on like cement.

The French writer Jean Markale (nom de plume of Jean Bertrand, who, like Brown, got himself into trouble for plagiarizing) wrote extensively on the same subject matter that is in Brown's novel. I favor Markale. My older son had "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." It might have been lost in the last move.

Brown took all the real people that Markale . . . and, I assume, the two men who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail . . . and scrambled their names to create Da Vinci.

I imagine it would be as it revolves around the original Royal family of France. According to 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' Charlemagne's grandfather Pepin was a mayor of Paris and a usurper.

The I Write Like program cannot analyse writing skill or style, in my opinion. I believe it has a short list of words or phrases, associated with each listed author. Which is probably a short list itself. Example: In my first submission, it likened me to James Joyce. There is no way in hell. I knew this right away, but was not certain why. But, my submitted page utilized at least two key words: 'atheist' and 'ghost.' Joyce was notoriously atheist. In Ulysses, Stephen's mother's ghost figures prominently. Possibly one or two other words sealed the deal. In, short, I don't write like Joyce; I use a few words associated with him.

Pepin was not mayor of Paris but mayor of the palace. Mayor of the palace meant something akin to "chief of staff," among the Franks, who gave their tribal name to France, which didn't exist at the time.

Medieval political organization was based on the model of the family. But the father of this Pepin (what we call first names or Christian names were dynasty markers) was the famous Charles Martel or Charles the Bastard. These mayors were the real power behind the weak Merovingian kings for quite some time but Charles seized the power and didn't stand on ceremony. Charles also created himself Duke and his son Pepin (known as Pepin the Short) 'inherited' the title Duke which was originally a war title. Dukes originally led armies. Count, on the other hand, was a fiscal title as the count collected taxes.

I'm reading a book called The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum which deals with all of the quarrels and frauds and public embarrassments surrounding current studies/stagings of Shakespeare.

Rosenbaum writes at length of a man named Don Foster, who exposed Anonymous of Primary Colors fame. The other thing Foster did (this is an extreme egotist) was to "discover" a lost poem of Shakespeare's called, "A Funerall Elegye,"using a data base he put together which he called SHAXICON.

To make a long story short, Foster is a boob whose ego led him to make ridiculous proclamations as well as an international figure of derision. The poem in question is now attributed to a minor Jacobean writer, John Ford, whose big success was a play, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore.

The mistake was discovered by a Swiss scholar doing what is known as a close reading of the text because a French publishing house wanted a translation into French. But, before it was discovered, scholars throughout the world lined up on either side of the debate, with the Times Literary Supplement backing Foster.

The point of all this is that Foster relied on a computer analysis. No one knows what Foster's database looked like because Foster never produced it. Rosenbaum theorizes that is was based on word count rather than analysis.

And that is akin to what I Write Like . . . is.

I Write Like is a parlour game, deserving of the British rather than the AMerican spelling.

No, it can not guarantee that your writing is to a high standard. I suspect this program may have had some paragraphs of several authors scanned into it. At its most sophisticated, it compares . . . and this is sheer conjecture on my part . . . the use of certain parts of speech and the order of your sentences.

The caution is, "At its most sophisticate . . ." because we have no idea how sophisticated it is. All if does is note a resemblance, a predilection to use certain . . . shall we call them stylistic notes . . . over others.

In case edgar or anyone else is interested in the difference between computer analysis and a scholarly close reading, here is just one point that the Swiss professor, G. D. Monsarrat, used to clue himself into the hand of John Ford and not that of William Shakespeare. (BTW, Monsarrat is a student of religious and devotional poetry and John Ford wrote a great deal of that. Monsarrat is also versed in Stoicism, the philosophy Ford embraced).

Anyway, what tipped Monsarrat off is the use of the word simplicity in the Elegye.

As cited by Rosenbaum, both Shakespeare and Ford use the word. After all, simplicity is a pretty basic concept! However, Ford always prefaces simplicity with a "synonymous" adjective like artless or spotless, while Shakespeare uses "pejorative" adjectives. Shakespeare wrote phrases like: "twice-sod simplicitie" and "low simplicitie."

Monsarrat is the sort of scholar a serious student should aspire to become.

NPR's All Things Considered had a brief story about I Write Like this afternoon.

I will make a point to listen to it! thanks!

Put one of my posts from the atheism thread and again got James Joyce.

I knew they'd pull up David Foster Wallace re my writing. I've never read one of his books, but I'm 99% sure I read an excerpt or short story of his in the New Yorker before his suicide. I know I read about his life in the New Yorker.

I came, multiple times. To misquote Harlan Ellison, "JOY. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO BE HAPPY SINCE I FOUND THIS APP. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD JOY WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE JOY I FEEL AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. JOY. JOY."

I write like George Orwell.

guess who writes like Vladimir Nabokov?
O'Henry, in The Gift of the Magi.