I ran my most recent 80 articles through iwl. Here are the results I got, grouped by author:
David Foster Wallace: 22
H.P. Lovecraft: 18
Cory Doctorow: 8
Edgar Allen Poe: 6
Margaret Mitchell: 5
Margaret Atwood: 3
Dan Brown: 3
Arthur Clarke: 2
James Joyce: 2
Douglas Adams: 1
Oscar Wilde: 1
William Shakespeare: 1
Stephen King: 1
Chuck Palahniuk: 1
Isaac Asimov: 1
Bram Stoker: 1
Mario Puzo: 1
George Orwell: 1
Rudyard Kipling: 1
Jane Austin: 1
Half of my articles apparently read like David Foster Wallace or H.P. Lovecraft.
After submitting some of my longer HN comments, I think the tool is more accurate about what I write than how I write. My comment on the Russian space program (which included the name of their moon probe (Luna) many times) was similar to Joanne K. Rowling (Luna Lovegood), another comment about TCP specifics is apparently similar to Cory Doctorow's writing.
For statistical analysis of writing styles as opposed to content it would be better to ignore all subjects (like Luna, TCP, ...) and only concentrate on the remaining words that are independent of the discussed topic.
David Foster Wallace (excerpt from blog post)
Edgar Allen Poe (introduction to peer-reviewed journal article)
Jonathan Swift (concluding paragraph from ibid)
I also tried:
The first few paragraph's of Wallace's Infinite Jest (he writes like himself)
The first few paragraphs of The Raven (Poe writes like HP Lovecraft), then the whole of The Raven (now Shakespeare), and first three paragraphs of The Masque of the Red Death (now Anne Rice)
The first three paragraphs of Swift's A Modest Proposal (Daniel Defoe).
I don't know much about literature--maybe e.g. Defoe's writing is similar to Swift's--but without seeing the reasons why I write like a particular author, I take these results with a grain of salt.
I don't think I've ever read The Catcher in the Rye, or in fact any of his other books, so I don't know if this is 'good' or 'bad'. It'd be interesting if there was some sort of measure of public opinion on an author to see how I rate (that's my ego talking) and also a comparison in % to how many other people got Salinger.
This was the most pleasant outcome I got from launching IWL: people wrote that they never heard of some of the authors, or that they heard but never read them, and then told me that they'll go read their works.
I had a lengthy medical crisis, during which time I "didn't get out much" so to speak. I imagine that's a big part of why I hadn't heard of him. I also imagine my future will be richer. Perhaps at some point I will look into reading some of his stuff, though my plate is fairly full at the moment. :-)
I got Cory Doctorow as well (from the intro to The Little MongoDB book and a few other posts). We were both school by more or less the same system (Ontario) more or less in the same timeframe (8 year difference).
I did the same thing. Apparently my code reads like an Edgar Allen Poe work. Maybe I should get a Vincent Price impersonator to do the voice over for my next demo.
FWIW: I tried twice and got the same result both times. I'm jealous of the Lovecraft result someone else got. I keep getting someone I've never heard of. :-/
Shared traffic stats here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745555