Editing 1414: Writing Skills

[[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) with lots of abbreviations.

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". Ability to form good grammar comes from practice through a lot of writing even when that writing is informal and hence the SMS generation get a lot of practice compared to the previous generations who communicated much more 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 more practice even when that practice is through informal writing such as SMS.

{{w|James Joyce}} was an 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 well known work, 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 todays children's writings for their  everyday use of written word over situation in 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, generally, will score much higher score "on various objective measures of writing quality". Randall may hint that writing a lot of short title texts, like writing lot of SMSs, improve your general writing quality - hence, further strengthens Cueball's point.

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

*Randall originally misspelled surprise as "suprise" in the first panel and also wrote "writing writing" in the beginning of the title text in stead 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.