Sunday, February 23, 2014

Your writing's personality type

This is a neat little tool for testing the "personality" of a piece of writing along myers-briggs type axes: introversion/extroversion, intuitive/sensing, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. Keep in mind, this gives the personality type of the piece of writing, not the writer. According to most tests, I'm an INTP or an INTJ (INFP if I'm having an emo day). I'm pretty sure, though, I'm some sort of intuitive introverted person with a slight preference rationality over emotion, and some well-developed "J" characteristics like being able meet deadlines in a timely fashion, and oh, death stare. (But I'm probably a native perceiving type.)

Among the fiction I pasted in, it got the "I" and "P" right most of the time, but my writing is apparently more sensing and feeling than I am. Since I tend to write characters who are detached observers in life, I'm strangely pleased that at least they resemble empathetic human-types. I am somewhat disappointed that most "N"-ness seems missing from my writing, since I think of myself as a pretty abstract thinker. The two pieces with a preference for "N" were loose examples of magic realism, I guess: one passage about telekinesis (INFP) and one where I slipped out of character and started writing as myself, warts and all (INTJ). But, I wonder, what would a piece of highly intuitive fiction even look like? If intuition is conceptual, and sensing is detail-heavy, wouldn't fiction, especially realistic fiction, by nature, be "sensing?" At least the kind people would want to read.

(For comparison, The previous two paragraphs were typed as INFP. Two older posts of mine came out INTP. The longer the piece, it seems, the more likely I'm correctly guessed as an INTP.)

Although this is largely just fun and games, I can't help but compare it to the gender genie -- another online tool from a few years ago that, according to some mysterious algorithm, determined whether the author of a piece of writing is male or female. Mine was always split 50/50, with fiction female, and blog posts or other dispassionate drivel thought to be penned by a dude. I tried to game it for a while (I noticed that female pronouns and anything heavy with "I" statements tended to be labeled female, but it's not nearly that simple. Interestingly, random song lyrics usually are usually typed as female irrespective of the author.)

Overall, a fun time waster, but I wouldn't take it too seriously.

1 comment:

  1. I pasted in some quotes from two writers known for their aphorisms: Fran Lebowitz (from Social Studies), and Quentin Crisp (from The Naked Civil Servant). INTJ and ENFP, respectively, which seems not entirely inaccurate.

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