Editing 1414: Writing Skills

| titletext = I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.

[[Cueball]] and [[White Hat]] are discussing the positive and negative effects of young people writing on mobile phones in the vernacular of the day, {{w|Short Message Service}} (SMS).

SMS messages are one of the primary means of text communication on mobile devices, and are typically limited to 160 characters. Due to the limited space available on this and other messaging platforms, and also to decrease the time taken to write a message, {{w|SMS language}} (aka textese) developed as a form of short-hand writing. This involves the abbreviation and deliberate misspelling of words, and the use of acronyms.

Naturally, the use of this style of language has expanded into other areas, including those where brevity is not an issue, and this expansion and evolution of language is a subject of intense debate. The main viewpoints on the subject are:

Cueball's point is that "practice makes perfect". The ability to form good grammar comes from practice through a lot of writing, even when that writing is informal; hence, the SMS generation gets a lot of practice compared to previous generations, who communicated mostly with speech, over the phone, and in person, and may have written only a few letters a year.  To foster talent for a major literary work, we should encourage practice, even when that practice is through informal writing such as SMS.

 

{{w|James Joyce}} was a celebrated Irish novelist and poet, and his novel {{w|Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses}} is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature. It was criticized in some quarters for the frequent lack of punctuation and ungrammatical {{w|Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)|stream of consciousness}} narrative mode. In addition to his better-known works, he wrote a number of love letters with extremely explicit content.

 

In the title text, Randall wishes to prove Cueball's point by analyzing and comparing bulk volumes of texts (= a {{w|Text corpus|corpus}}) written by children today and 20 years ago. Randall favors the literary ability of today's children for their everyday use of written word over the situation of the past, when children wrote only if forced to do so. The title text's second sentence is particularly long and complex (compared to almost any other title text), which will generally score much higher "on various objective measures of writing quality". Randall may be hinting that writing a lot of short title texts, like writing a lot of SMSs, improves your general writing quality - further strengthening Cueball's point. The title text is also 99 words long, probably referencing a 100 word limit.

:Cueball: Why on ''earth'' is that a surprise?

*Randall originally misspelled surprise as "suprise" in the first panel and also wrote "writing writing" in the beginning of the title text instead of just "writing". It was initially conjectured here that the errors may have been deliberately introduced as they are relevant to the subject. However, both of these errors were corrected on the same day the comic was released and currently are not present in the live version.