I'm not sure how they're working this:

iwl.me

It's this site that's supposed to say what writer a given writer writes like. I've put in varied text, and got varied results.

My Comp II final paper from last year was H. P. Lovecraft. Some streams of conciousness I'd done for cathartic purposes were all over the place; I got J. D. Salinger two times, though. I wanted to shoot myself, though, when it decided that one of my poems was Stephanie Meyer...
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I thought I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away.

I got Dan Brown.

I was insulted.
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Assumedly it's a naive Bayes classifier. I wonder how the author got machine-readable copies of texts that are still in copyright, like Twilight.

The complete text of The Lone Argonaut (my novel) yielded "J. R. R. Tolkien". Huh.

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"You blockhead!" -Cheez

Several of my other writings yielded Lovecraft. I admit I like Lovecraft, but I suspect that the database is missing verbose nineteenth-century writers like Hawthorne and Dickens (and Bulwer-Lytton), leaving Lovecraft as the best match for long, complicated sentences.

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"You blockhead!" -Cheez

Oh, and my pre-lab report is apparently written like Edgar Allen Poe.
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I thought I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away.

That site is garbage.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].

Put in some fantasy pieces I wrote recently. I got a couple of Robert Louis Stevenson, a Raymond Chandler, an L. Frank Baum, and Rudyard Kipling for a different piece that happened to be a Wizard of Oz parody. One of my pieces gave Douglas Adams but I suspect that's mostly because it uses the word "hitchhiker" a couple of times.

Also just for yuks I gave it one of my more humorous class essays and got H.P. Lovecraft. I think the guy just wrote like essays, man.
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I got three different results. Two separate blog entries got Cory Doctorow and David Foster Wallace, who I am now Wikipedia'ing, and snippets of stories that I've written got Tolkein.
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From: Kodiologist

Several of my other writings yielded Lovecraft. I admit I like Lovecraft, but I suspect that the database is missing verbose nineteenth-century writers like Hawthorne and Dickens (and Bulwer-Lytton), leaving Lovecraft as the best match for long, complicated sentences.

No, sometimes Dan Brown is the best match for those.

How come of this were a Facebook quiz, none of us would be surprised by the imprecision of the responses? Like then it's understood that certain prominent figures would be standing as a synecdoche the whole period, but now this site has a shred of credibility and immediately spends it on sucking.
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I nabbed Jane Austen (old paper on Elizabeth I), David Foster Wallace (Interview), Stephen King (sports piece) and finally H.P. Lovecraft (old paper on Aeneid...So lots of gods involved).
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