Just like the old man in that book by Neville Cobb

Sports editor Hayden Meikle sent round an email. The email included a link to a new website – it has only had about a million hits so far – that contains a program called a writing analyser.

The analyser lets you paste in a few paragraphs of your writing and then tells you which famous author you write like. Naturally this appealed to ODT editorial staff, and not just because we have nothing better to do than psychometric-type tests online.

Sports editor Hayden reported: “I did it twice and both times came back David Foster Wallace, known for his dark humour and ironic wit who, naturally, killed himself.”

He also gave the results for his colleagues in the sports department, reporters Steve Hepburn (James Bond creator Ian Fleming), Adrian Seconi (“Irish boozehound” James Joyce) and Alistair McMurran (The Godfather author Mario Puzo).

But honestly, nobody reads the sports pages, do they? Far more interesting, I thought, was to investigate whom the columnists write like; for surely, the overall tone of the Otago Daily Times is to be found in its opinion pages . . .

On Thursday, Joe Bennett, in a touching depiction of an alcoholic melancholic friend, was writing like the melancholic alcoholic Edgar Allan Poe. Joe Poe.

On Friday, Roger Kerr, banging on about closing the income gap with Australia, was writing like H.P. Lovecraft. The trusty Wikipedia says Lovecraft specialised in a sci-fi subgenre known as “weird fiction”.

This weekend, Civis, who in real life looks like Trotsky, was writing like Lewis Carroll when he asked, “Why do we enjoy gazing at the sea so much?”

Of course, all three regular readers of this blog will have noticed last week I was writing like Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, the great Russian, who first came to my attention about five years ago when someone explained to me the line in that song by The Police refers to “Nabokov”, not “Neville Cobb”. That was ignorance; bliss was when I subsequently read a few of his short stories.

News and opinion are the meat and veges of the newspaper, but what about the garnishes? The daily Bible readings, the corrections, and yes the occasional advertisement: to the work of which famous authors would the analyser compare these?

Thursday’s Bible reading, “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example,” was in the critically not-well-received style of The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown.

Irish boozehound James Joyce himself could not have penned a better correction than this, published on Friday: “The story in yesterday's Arts section on the show A Song to Sing, O! carried an image captioned Gilbert. It was Sullivan.”

In an ad for The Warehouse, in white font against a blazing red sun-dot-thing, was the text: “Glass Drinkware * Servingware * Knives, Knife Blocks & Chopping Boards.”

I entered that into the analyser. It said The Warehouse’s advertising folk write like horror baron Stephen King.