A new website has gone viral. It’s called “I write like,” and you can find it at http://iwl.me. Enter any text and it tells you which, of the works of 50 famous authors, the writing is most similar to. The software was developed by a Russian computer programmer, living in Montenegro, who claims it uses a simple Bayesian algorithm (like a spam filter!) to determine likeness. Among the features considered are: vocabulary, sentence-length and the frequency of commas or periods. It is an excellent toy.

I discovered I write my column like Margaret Atwood and was flattered. “Good job!” the HTML badge said. I thought so too. Then, I read that someone found that Mel Gibson drunkenly rants like Margaret Atwood. Who, in turn, is supposed to write like Stephen King (she tweeted this result herself). I discovered that Madonna’s preteen daughter has been proven to blog like Vonnegut, which made me choke a little, and finally, I discovered I write my emails like David Foster Wallace and was flattered. Good job, Rosie. Good job.

With the exception of the “Dan Brown” result, which has inspired the indignation of many a netizen, the website is vacuously validating. The creator said he wanted to encourage people to write more, and he’s probably succeeded in this. But he also seems to want people to write better: your result comes with a link to “On Writing,” by Stephen King. I’m sure many find this confusing. I’ve just been patted on the back for writing like James Joyce, why would I bother with pointers from a pop novelist?

First I thought that the application could be made much more valuable very easily, without altering the algorithm. Similarity is subjective, and the software is certainly picking out something. If we extended the database to include a few classes of writing other than The Best, the majority of text might gravitate to the more ordinary genres. If we included Lourdes’ fashion blog, for example, my best friends’ 9th-grade Xanga entries would likely be much more “like” it than the writing of J. D. Salinger. There could even be an option to add your writing to the database whenever you analyze it, filling out a short survey on the work–when was it written, is it published, the age of the author, that kind of thing. Sure it’d probably be less popular, but under these conditions, if your writing turned up as “David Foster Wallace” and not “67 percent of emails between friends aged 18-30,” that might mean something. And many people who considered themselves excellent writers, but were analyzed to be ordinary, would rise to the challenge and work to “beat” the program.

I thought for a while about how satisfying it would be to have that badge, which you could tack onto your C.V. along with your SAT and IQ scores. Take that, New Yorker, I’d say. Reject the fiction I submitted in high school will you? Well, I wrote that story like Proust, and some statistics, somewhere, say so! It has similar words, punctuation and sentence-length. So…

So style just isn’t an indicator of real quality. The best writers are also great thinkers. And style is only valuable so far as it serves the author’s message. “I write like” has no way of knowing whether my subplots, metaphors or motifs constructively interact with my overall concept. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but this definitely looks like the wrong tree to me. If Holden Caulfield was real, if he had written “Catcher in the Rye” as an account of his experience, it wouldn’t be a great work of literature. It would be the journal of a relatively ordinary, troubled youth. A different message, but, to “I write like,” an identical style. As it is, “Catcher” is a forceful exploration of authenticity and identity. The first-person voice confronts the issue of perspective. It adopts a conversational, introspective tone, because that feels authentic while consciously being an artifice. And the narrator is the way he is because the people most actively reflective about these issues are self-obsessed, obnoxious teenagers.

If I, instead of Lourdes, had written, “so I’m gonna bring my camera to East London and take pictures of cool looking people and come off as weird cuz I’m gonna ask people to like stand still so I can take pics of them…” in an epistolary novel, it might come close to qualifying as a work truly in the style of Salinger. But “I write like” wouldn’t know it.

Write like Rosie? Let her know at [email protected].