Nabokov to Dan Brown: the decline of the literary succès de scandale
I friend of mine was telling me about one of these bullshit programs that analyzes your writing (instantaneously) and tells you what famous author you supposedly write like, probably based on your frequency of use of the word “the.” I fed it passages from the story I’m writing just for the hell of it, and I got back four different names: Dan Brown, Cory Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and Vladimir Nabokov. Those would actually form pretty decent category headings for four major gradations of writing ability, and are probably the only four names in its database, but in any case I think I can say, without making any special claims for myself one way or another, that neither I nor probably anyone else on this earth writes like both Dan Brown and Nabokov.
July 22nd, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I got David Foster Wallace, Cory Doctorow, George Orwell, and Douglas Adams. There is a certain consistency there.
Just to confuse it, I also put in pieces of my dissertation. Results: Doctorow again, Edgar Allen Poe, Dan Brown, and James Joyce.