I didn’t know who Cory Doctorow was. Truly. I guess if I have to compare myself to an author I’ve not heard of it’s better than realising that my work is ripped off from someone I regularly read.
Then I did the stupidest thing ever. I decided to analyse a different chunk of the same book. My NaNoWriMo book is in alternating voice; sections dealing with Jess are in first person while the sections about her mother Linda are in third person. The Jess section apparently sounds like Cory Doctorow. The Linda sections? I want to puke.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
HA!
Cory Doctorow writes for BoingBoing! and is a big privacy/rights supporter. He also is, I believe, a Big Brother conspiracy theorist. I love him, of course. 🙂
Did ya see this?
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/07/20/i.write.like.authors.website/index.html?hpt=C2
I find it amusing that Poe’s “The Raven” apparently isn’t written like Poe.
I was so aghast at the Meyer comparison that I actually went back over my work and some random sections of Twilight.
Other than being in third person and being about women there was NO similarity. My syllable count per paragraph is higher; my word count per sentence is higher. My adjective count was lower but my metaphor and similie counts were higher.
Those would be just a few of the data points I’d personally use in computing a stylistic comparison algorithm.
I think the dude who invented this is just completely off base.
I love how he basically admitted he isn’t qualified to analyse literature. That’s blindingly obvious.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Nah, for him it wasn’t about literature. That was just the topic he happened to choose to teach himself to code that sorta algorithm. I’m cool with that. I do similar things to teach myself some new web-coding trick I want to learn. Of course none of my explorations have gone viral and landed me a CNN interview.
I put some of my blog posts through the analyzer. I got H.G. Wells, Tolstoy, Margaret Mitchell, and Shakespeare. Trust me — none of those “matches” made sense.
And this piece…”See Bill run. Run, Bill, run. See Scruffy chase Bill. See Bill fall.”…is said to be like Margaret Atwood!
Doctrow is critically acclaimed and has had books up for various awards, including the Hugo I think.
I’d be flattered by the comparison…:)