Cory Doctorow in a world of Shakespeares

By: Unknown on 04:59

I write like
Cory Doctorow

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

...except when I don't. 

Last week I saw this doo-dad making the rounds in some of the blogs I follow.  My buddy Pat pointed it out to me a couple weeks ago.  Poor bastard writes like Dan Brown according to iwl.me's widget.  The thing is, I don't know what text he used.  I got Cory Doctorow as my result when I fed in my review of the Wraeththu rpg.  But this post about morale apparently reads more like Chuck Palahniuk.  And my OD&D module is in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft, while my little essay 'On System' apparently leans towards P.G. Wodehouse.  I always thought I wrote like a love child of Douglas Adams and S. John Ross that had been dropped on his head as an infant, but what do I know?

Gutenberg.org makes this game super-easy to play with various dead writers.  Hamlet, it turns out, sounds quite a bit like the works of William Shakespeare.  So does Act 1, Scene 1 of Vortigern, a hoax once passed off as a work by old Willy.  But then Samuel Butler's prose translation of Homer also sounds like Shakespeare.  Kit Marlowe's Faustus (the 1616 verson) also sounds like Shakespeare according to this widget.  So does Keats' unfinished play King Stephen.  Now I'm starting to get pissed off.  Who doesn't sound like Shakespeare to this machine?  A random chunk of The Faerie Queen?  Shakespeare.  Some William Blake poetry?  Fucking Shakespeare!  Chaucer's Wife of Bath?  William goddamn Shakespeare!!!

What the fuck?!  I write like four different dudes but all these guys are William Shakespeare?  I'm honestly a little afraid to put some Emily Dickinson into the box.  If it came out Shakespeare I would probably go on a homicidal rampage.