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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Fun Site of the Day

Roger Ebert's tweets clued me into this site: I Write Like.  Copy and paste some of your writing and you will find who you write most like, according to their program.  I plugged in a bunch of stuff and the result was, with one exception, David Foster Wallace. 
The wiki on him is:
Wallace used many forms of irony, focusing on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience, and communication in a media-saturated society. Wallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. His writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes—often nearly as expansive as the text proper.
Ah, acronyms, explanatory footnotes, jargon....  Now it makes sense.  Still better than the one outlier result: Isaac Asimov.  I really do not want my next book to read like science fiction.

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