The other day, Tom Chandler over at the Copywriter Underground posted a link to a beta project called the Typealyzer. What this bizarre sounding website does is attempt to diagnose the voice of a blog through the Jung / Myers-Briggs personality test. I say attempt, as Typealyzer isn’t exposing their methods and the results are incredibly fast – which seems to suggest that the program is simply scanning for repetition of certain keywords, which reduces the actually usefulness of the program to “neat.”
Your actual voice my differ
What got me to thinking, however, was the results I got from Typealyzer was not the same as the one I typically get from an Myers-Briggs test. So, I through my old personal blog at the Typealyzer and got not the expected results, but rather a repetition of the first results. Paper personality tests always had me pegged as an INFJ whereas this test, using a broad sample of my writing on a multitude of topics and a over a broad time, declared my written voice an ISTP. The differences here are rather substantial, but what caught my attention wasn’t the difference but the fact that there was a difference.
Yes, I am taking this test at face value, and yes, it’s safe to assume that is a mistake. But the question being begged is still valuable. When a writer is asked to find their voice, how often do we stop and consider how close that voice is to our actual personality? Furthermore, is that potential divorce a good thing?
It’s certainly a question I’ll have to get to at a later time.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.