Here’s why that “I Write Like” site you’ve been hearing about is a bunch of absolute bullshit

I Write Like, in the words of the A.V. Club, is basically nothing more than “the ego-inflating yet slightly dismissive mentor you’ve never had.”

Here’s how it works. First, you copy a block of your own original text, such as the brief blurb that I’m about to make up as I go along:

“The greatest tragedy of the life of Vincent van Gogh is not the fact that we came to recognize his artistic genius only after his passing, but the fact that we have yet to recognize that his greatest gift to the world was an ass that wouldn’t quit.”

Then you paste it into a form and hit a button, and in just a matter of seconds the website tells you that you write like Arthur Conan Doyle. And if you go back, change “Vincent Van Gogh” to “Ed Asner,” and submit the otherwise exact same block of text again, it’ll tell you that you write like Oscar Wilde. Change “Ed Asner” to “Donkey Kong,” and your writing suddenly bears a striking resemblance to the classic prose of Kurt Vonnegut.

That in itself should be enough to suggest that the algorithm at the heart of the site is flawed at best. But the other major problem with the site, as anyone who spent the afternoon on Twitter watching their friends get the same names over and over again can tell you, is that the site’s only got about a dozen names in its database.

One of them is Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club and other such deconstructions of postmodern masculinity. Just for fun, here’s an excerpt from Palahniuk’s nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction:

“This is a kind of weird aside, but a friend in medical school made me a deal that if I introduced her to Brad Pitt, she’d sneak me in to help her dissect some cadavers. She met Brad, and I spent a long night helping her disassemble dead bodies so first-year premed students could study them. Our third cadaver was a sixty-year-old physician. He had the muscle mass and definition of a man in his twenties, but when we opened his chest, his heart was almost the size of his head. I held his chest open and my friend poured in Formalin until his lungs floated. My friend looked at his freaking big heart, and his equally freaky-big dick, and told me: testosterone. Self-administered for years.”

According to I Write Like – a site that features Palahniuk among its extremely limited list of authors – Palahniuk writes like David Foster Wallace. Which comes as no surprise, because if Twitter is any indication, so do about a dozen of my friends.

Why go to the trouble of building and promoting a site like this if it can’t even do the one job it’s meant to do? Because at the end of every response, there’s a link to a site where you can buy a bunch of e-books that’ll teach you how to write a great book proposal. And really, now that you know you write like one of a randomly selected handful of great writers, don’t you owe it to yourself to pay some guy on the web to tell you how to put that gift to good use?

In short, I Write Like is about ten seconds of fun, and it can basically tell you as much about your writing style as a “Which Spice Girl Are You?” quiz can tell you about your musical ability. And as I said earlier today, until this site tells me I write like Matt Blair, I’ll be forced to assume that it doesn’t know the first thing about awesome writing.

And I should know, because that last paragraph alone was proof positive that I write like Douglas Adams. Which is great, because that’s exactly what I was going for.

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