I haven’t participated in Randy’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun at Genea-Musings for quite awhile, not because I don’t want to, but time has not been in excess lately. At any rate, tonight’s challenge is to visit the website I Write Like and share our results. I’m participating for two reasons, first because I have a few minutes to do so, and second because I’m curious to see what it says.
Let’s take a look!
I chose to analyze four different pieces of writing.
The first piece is a blog post I wrote about my search for my great-great-grandfather Emil Miller, which also includes a research plan of sorts. The result was H.P. Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a fiction writer, best known for “weird fiction.” I’m not sure how my research finds and research plan became “weird fiction.”
The second piece is a blog post I wrote about the genealogy of my great-great-grandfather James Manly Garrison. The result was James Joyce, the author of Ulysses. Again, I’m not sure how this particular post figures into novel writing, but I like that I supposedly write like one of the “most influential writers of the 20th century.” [1]
The third piece is an article I wrote about a year ago for the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly. The article was about the Stevenson-Ives Library and Archives in McLean County, Illinois. The result was David Foster Wallace, yet another fiction writer. I’m beginning to wonder if there are an non-fiction writers among the authors this website uses to do its analysis. But again, I can’t complain being compared to another influential writer.
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
The last piece is an article that was published in the Summer 2010 issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly. The article was about using Facebook for genealogy. The result was Dan Brown, a best-selling author know for The Da Vinci Code. Another novelist, but again, not complaining, he’s a great writer!
All-in-all I’d say I run with the best of ‘em, despite the fact that each of the authors is best known for fiction writing and I am a non-fiction, business, and technical writer (with no interest in writing fiction). Maybe some day I can aspire to be an influential genealogy writer :)
Sources
1. Wikipedia, James Joyce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce : accessed 17 July 2010.
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