Hat tip to Brian Greenberg for this one: plug in a block of text into the I Write Like website, and it’ll tell you which great authors you emulate.

I happen to do a bunch of different writing, so I plugged in various writing samples.

For example, a chapter of the novel I’m working on: David Foster Wallace. Okay, nice start—one of the best writers in recent history, IMO. Of course, he was also horrifically manic depressive and hung himself in his garage a while back, so presumably the comparison only goes so far.¹

For Macworld, TidBITS, or blog postings: Cory Doctorow. Call me a bit surprised by this one. It was no surprise that Brian writes like a guy who wrote Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. But I think Doctorow’s prose is a lot more colorful than my nonfiction work tends to be, and certainly a lot more opinionated than my editors let me get away with.

So then I plugged in a swath of my nonfiction book, and the result was:

James frakking Joyce.

You’re kidding me, right?

¹Plus, I don’t use footnotes.