I Write Like David Foster Wallace

It would appear that Martin Sullivan writes like David Foster Wallace, a man of immense and graceful prose. He's not sure that that's a good thing though, for he's read some of Wallaces's stuff.

In one of my random intellectual staggers across the vast plains of the Internet I came across a curious little web-site (IWL.ME). This site claimed to run an undisclosed but powerful statistical analysis on a sample text and compare it to a range of known samples. These samples were by 'famous' authors and allowed you to declare that you wrote like somebody famous, or at least like somebody you might have heard of. OK, a harmless piece of intellectual fluff. Let's try it on some of my writing. I put samples from my web-site, both old (pre-millennia) and new through this system. In each case it suggested that I wrote like David Foster Wallace. Intrigued I also tried some random text from other web-sites. This proved that Wallace wasn't some kind of default answer and that things I liked also appeared to have a Wallace style. I immediately repaired to Wikipedia to find out who Wallace was, for I'd never heard of him. It transpired that he was a writer of deep intellectual books characterized by a complicated but correct sentence structure involving many sub-clauses, asides and annotation. He taught composition at a University, he was also a depressive who killed himself in 2008.

David Foster Wallaces's Magnum Opus

Anyhow, I reasoned that if I wrote like him, then, perhaps, I might like his stuff. I read a transcribed lecture of his on-line and found it interesting. So, finding myself in a bookshop with a copy of his magnum-opus I decided to buy it. This, "Infinite Jest", would be my holiday reading. Superficial scanning suggested that its dense prose would be an intellectual challenge. I generally devour books on holiday and need something heavy or in a foreign language to slow me down.

Wallace was famous for Footnotes. I do notes in the margin, however.

And so I started flogging my way through it. There were a number of amusing anecdotes but they were linked by huge apparently drug-fueled streams of consciousness. All the events appeared to occur on a slightly distopian near future and involved college-scholarship Tennis players and recovering drug addicts, both of which Wallace had some personal experience of.

It was indeed hard going. I found myself skimming almost immediately but was rewarded by some quite funny and interesting passages buried under all the waffle. By about the end or the holiday I'd managed to get through about a third of it. Along the way my wife, tiring of my moaning, bought some books from the second-hand shop in town (Langå). I took time-off from "Infinite Jest" to read David Brin's "The Postman", in English. I read it in a single day, more-or-less at a single sitting. Another distopian near future. The future is indeed full of crap.

So, do I write like David Foster Wallace? Perhaps, but I think I shouldn't. So, in future, more short sentences, less subordinate clauses, like this one, and definitely less parentheses (except when justified).

Hursley Park is an IBM Development Laboritory in the UK.

One of my former colleagues from Hursley wrote to me asking me to explain some aspect of Physical Chemistry. She remembered that I was a Biochemist by training. Realising that I can go on a bit, she asked for the explanation in short sentences. I tried to oblige by writing like the popular author Clive Cussler, he of pacy spy thrillers. Having done this I submitted the e-mail to the scrutiny of the IWL web-site. It appears that in this instance I wrote like Dan Brown. On reading it, however, it looked rather artificial and I would not normally have prepared a technical explanation like that. In fact, I'd have probably gotten into trouble if I'd produced it for either University or Unilever Research.

Later I read that famous author Margaret Attwood had submitted some of her stuff and was disturbed to find that she didn't write like famous author Margaret Attwood. So, probably not very scientific or accurate.

And I still haven't finished David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest". I suspect that I'm not the only one.

Langå, 22nd August 2010.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Gormless Anecdotes

Martin is known for his long-winded e-mails and has decided to inflict them on the Internet like this, suitably cleaned up and formatted. There's the starting page with some explanation, and then, so far:

• Hunting the Flush Bug
• Chemi-Luminescent Vim
• Helping With an Enquiry
• Light From Under the Door
• I Write Like David Foster Wallace
• The Origami Artist
• Pattern Matching Randomness
• The Indole Chemistry of Bananas
• Volunteer Projectionist

Also of Interest

Jucy morsels from the rest of the site:

• General papers on On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP). It's still the main topic of the web-site.
• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for Martin too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, Martin can still bore people in the Third-person past tense.
• Of the little hacks that he's done recently, the Unofficial Jobcentre Plus Mirror is the one thing that seems to have gained traction.
• Other ephemeral, eclectic stuff. Mostly photographs.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.