In Which I Hang Up My Laptop
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Just me on Saturday, July 17, 2010 4:00 PM
A friend who despises the Twilight series took the quiz at the “I Write Like” site and came up with Stephenie Meyer. Horrors!
Curious, I plugged in one of my Faith & Family columns for analysis.
Yikes! Maybe the real magic of the quiz is that it intuits which author you feel most smugly superior to and takes you down a peg?
Different columns yield the result: David Foster Wallace. I would probably feel better if I knew who that was.
Tempted to give up trying to write anything beyond a grocery list, I decided to waste a few more moments of my life plugging in excerpts from authors whose style I admire.
Leif Enger, William Faulkner & Willa Cather all come up as David Foster Wallace, too.
As for the Dan Brown result, I have a theory.
There is a certain clipped mode of writing necessary when you’re confined to 650 words (the length of a typical magazine column). And writing for the ‘net requires even more pith, because people don’t read what looks long to the eye.
You have to break up your sentences and paragraphs somewhat artificially.
Dan Brown, in my view, writes in the clipped style of a blogger. So I don’t write like him, he writes like me 
Carl Olson over at Insight Scoop is having similar thoughts.
Who do you write like? Who would you like to write like?
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