I do love living in the age of instantaneous self acknowledgment and gratification. There are myriad and mass perks to being alive right at this very moment. The last month and a half of my life, for instance, has been spent pointing my cell phone at random objects and having the device offer a glut of useless information regarding whatever I was looking at. At some point, I did get tired of pointing the phone at trees and having the braniac inform me “That’s a tree.” I got punched in the head after scanning some Chicago Cubs fan and telling him that the phone came up with Google search results for ‘fat suits’ and ‘beard diapers’.  The instant feedback age is full of good and entertaining (albeit useless) advances. Many that don’t result in my getting beat up, in fact. One example is I Write Like.

Leafing through a newspaper the other day I happened to see a general interest story about I Write Like (http://www.iwl.me/), a site that is purported to instantly analyze your particular writing style and compare it to a famous author’s work. Granted, I heard about this through the local paper, just moments before I made a hat from it and ran into the yard shouting “Arrrrr.” I honestly didn’t know what else to do with the thing. When I came back indoors, news hat ruined, I started to wonder about the whole I Write Like idea. What famous person’s written oeuvre does my work resemble? Martha Stewart, maybe. I do use the term ‘patina’ a lot. There’s Ernest Hemingway. Not the famous one (that’s too much self-flattery), but the guy who details cars down the street from me. He’s a prolific writer and a bathroom wall limerick legend. I made the mistake of clicking onto iwritelike.com, an ad site that tells every respondent their writing is a subconscious effort to mimic Chuck Norris. You can actually submit nothing at all and get the same result. Now, I sat and watched one of Chuck’s ’70′s (eh hem) classics recently and can honestly say that no one is trying on any level to write in the style of Chuck Norris. In the movie I watched, Chuckles journeys to a town run by a corpulent, drunken mayor in order to save his brother from the local muscle. Norris, in his unique way, manages to bed a waitress after she serves him coffee. If Norris had anything to do with the writing of that film then I know for sure that I’m not attempting his writing style.

After submitting two samples from this blog to the real I Write Like, the results were that my writing resembles that of Cory Doctrow and H.P. Lovecraft. Neither of the styles these two gentleman became famous for is reassuring in any way and I may as well quit writing this instant (Amen!). H.P. Lovecraft, was not a home computer designed for use by couples, but the author of necromantic science fiction until his death in 1937. Doctrow is a blogger and science fiction author from Canada. I decided to try a third, independent test and submitted someone else’s writing from an adult site. The poorly written, very misspelled piece of literature was analyzed and the result came back J.D. Salinger. So much for instant literary analysis. The I Write site is operated by Russian software programmer  Dmitry Chestnykh and is a lot of fun, but not exactly serious critique. For laugh’s, The Christian Science Monitor recommends submitting your work to I Actually Write Like. I submitted my first sample again and got the following: “You Actually Write Like A Moonstruck Lunatic Possibly Wearing A Straightjacket.” Oh, thank heavens for that. Next to that subtle hint was an illustrated pile of feces. There you have it. Technological gratification.