Thursday, October 4, 2018

Essay Genomes

I was driving somewhere late at night, listening to some talk radio and it was a bit that would only be fascinating to English nerds. It was fascinating to me. It was this website someone at BYU had created where you could upload some of your own writing and then they would analyze it and tell you which famous essayists you wrote the most like. Obviously, I went home and tried it.

As I was waiting very long minutes for the magic website to analyze my stellar writing (I submitted a sacrament talk, an old college paper, an old blog post,and a very angry passionately worded email to an ex-boyfriend I wrote but never sent - just to give the magic website a variety of what good writing looked like) I was giddily imagining the essayists it was bound to tell me I wrote like: CS Lewis, Louise Plummer, David Sedaris...I was sure those would be my writing soulmates.

Instead, these were my results:





Now...if only I was an information analyst nerd to truly understand these results. I see the names Milne (of Winnie the Pooh legend), Twain, and Plato on these charts. I'll take it.

They did also provide you with this lovely word cloud that shows your most often used words. The bigger the word, the more you use it. I guess I'm a KNOW-it-all. Hahaha, don't mind that joke, it's just my Twain coming out.



If you are also an English nerd, and would like to try it yourself, here's the website:
http://egp.byu.edu/

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