Writing Skills
Writing Skills
[White Hat and Cueball are walking together, White Hat is holding a newspaper or report.] White Hat: Weird- Another study found that kids who use SMS abbreviations actually score higher on grammar and spelling tests. Cueball: Why on earth is that a surprise?
[Cueball turns to White hat (who is now out side the frame. Inserted in the frame is a panel showing several kids throwing balls.] Cueball: Imagine kids suddenly start playing catch literally all the time . Everywhere they go, they throw balls back and forth, toss them in the air, and hurl them at trees and signs- Nearly every waking hour of their lives.
[Cueball talks on while White Hat begins to walk.] Cueball: Do you think their generation will suck at baseball because they learned sloppy skills? White Hat: ...So you think someone will become a great writer while sexting?
[They walk together.] Cueball: Have you read James Joyce's love letters? The phrases "My little fuckbird" and "Arse full of farts" appear. If we want to write Ulysses , our generation may not be sexting enough . White Hat: Eww.

Cueball and White Hat are discussing the positive and negative effects of young people writing on mobile phones in the vernacular of the day, 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, 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.
This idea has some real scientific background. Such as the investigation in 2009 Exploring the relationship between children's knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes . In this study children 10-12 were asked to compose text messages. The number of textisms was recorded, and a positive correlation was found between use of sms abbreviations and success at literacy tests. This is then related to David Crystal's concept of "ludic" language: the playful use of language as a contribution to language development. That notion is developed here: By playing with textual language, one develops writing skills, just as by playing with balls one can develop sports skills. David Crystal explains : "Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed great literary awareness [...] If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have intuited that there is a standard."
James Joyce was a celebrated Irish novelist and poet, and his 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 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 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.
[White Hat and Cueball are walking together, White Hat is holding a newspaper or report.] White Hat: Weird- Another study found that kids who use SMS abbreviations actually score higher on grammar and spelling tests. Cueball: Why on earth is that a surprise?
[Cueball turns to White hat (who is now out side the frame. Inserted in the frame is a panel showing several kids throwing balls.] Cueball: Imagine kids suddenly start playing catch literally all the time . Everywhere they go, they throw balls back and forth, toss them in the air, and hurl them at trees and signs- Nearly every waking hour of their lives.
[Cueball talks on while White Hat begins to walk.] Cueball: Do you think their generation will suck at baseball because they learned sloppy skills? White Hat: ...So you think someone will become a great writer while sexting?
[They walk together.] Cueball: Have you read James Joyce's love letters? The phrases "My little fuckbird" and "Arse full of farts" appear. If we want to write Ulysses , our generation may not be sexting enough . White Hat: Eww.
