Sunday, July 18, 2010

I Write Like...Vladimir Nabokov?

There is a new website called "I Write Like" that, given a few sample paragraphs of your writing style, tells you which famous author your writing most resembles. So I submitted the following excerpt from a recent BBQ restaurant review:

Sara regretted ordering fried squash, as it turned out to be frozen rather than fresh. The hush puppies were hand formed and edible, which is better than we have found in many barbecue restaurants. They weren't the best hush puppies we have eaten, though. The pork barbecue meat was sliced as we both requested; not much of a smoke ring in evidence, and not much smoke flavor, either. Still, it was properly tender, if a bit dry (order your barbecue chopped if you want to be able to properly moisten it with sauce). Porky's had two barbecue sauces on hand, a vinegar-based Eastern NC sauce (Sara pronounced it mostly vinegar and otherwise flavorless) and a dark brown tomato-based sauce that probably came from a commercial gallon jug, not much tang and a little too sweet.

Sara had thought about ordering banana pudding for dessert, but after she observed the waitresses manufacturing it behind the lunch counter using a 1-gallon can of commercial pudding glop and commenting loudly enough for Sara to hear about how many bananas to put into it, she decided to skip on the banana pudding. We skipped on the desserts, as a matter of fact.

Service at Porky's was quick and efficient, with our waitress only making one mistake when she poured iced tea into my Diet Coke. She caught herself and brought me a new one, so it was all right in the end.

After lunch we drove home via Albemarle, North Carolina, and stopped in at the Sonic Drive-In there, and ordered milk shakes for our delayed dessert. The waitress roller-skated our order out to us. If you're an American Idol fan, this particular Sonic is the drive-in that Kelly Pickler worked in during high school.


And received the following result:


I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!




Although I swear I haven't been ogling the teenaged BBQ waitresses...

I have to guess that this will become something of a meme among my blogging friends in the next day or so.

3 comments:

Borepatch said...

Try feeding it the one on the Ghurka, or one of your many on the British NHS.

Bob said...

@Borepatch: the one on the Gurkha resulted in Ian Fleming. *grins*

Bob said...

@borepatch: and I wonder how many writers are in the database that they used? You think if I wrote about Florida and beach girls and hairy economists and pale-eyed boat bums with a Quixote complex I'd get John D. MacDonald as the result? Or if I wrote about a bunch of white-trash inbreds down in Georgia I'd get Erskine Caldwell?