Just keep reading. I eventually come to some sort of conclusion.
10:50 p.m.
So, in order not to spend my whole entry talking about the weather, I will boast instead of another feather in my cap. A short piece that I entered in a competition at Elftown actually won. I’m not terribly surprised. The site targets people who are interested in fantasy and sci-fi art and fiction, so you get a whole cross section of people who have a penchant for one or the other or both. I love to read F&SF literature, but I’m not really into what they call fan fiction, i.e. all those thousands of books that came out inspired by Star Wars and Star Trek.
The Elftown site encourages its members to produce art by hosting competitions. My daughter has been a member for a while and regularly submits work to the visual arts contests. These include photos, manipulated photos, drawings and paintings and photoshop creations of fairies and other fantastic creatures. Whatever you can imagine, that’s what they get. But they also host writing contests as well, and I already submitted a poem that won in its category, and now a short fiction piece.
The reason I’m not surprised, as I mentioned above, is that even though I think of myself as a tolerably competent author, the competition was horrendous. Spelling and grammar are generally pretty bad, syntax non-existent and punctuation a bad dream. Some of the stories were clever, most were derivative and so poorly written that I ended up skimming and missing the point. It makes me wonder exactly what children are being taught in school these days.
Which brings me to my next harangue. As you may know, I spend an inordinate amount of time in the Diaryland chat room. I would say that for the most part the people I befriend there know how to write coherent sentences. In fact, we have more or less banded together against those youngsters who come in and type exclusively in net speak, or whatever its official name is.
The other night a youngster came into the room (I speak as though it were a real place, situated in space as well as time, which it is not: it is merely a cyber construct) and none of us could understand her. She typed almost exclusively in consonants, eschewing all vowels, and had the audacity when pressed to claim that everyone did this, and that her teacher at school even accepted work handed in like that.
I’m sorry, this is just too much. We made her feel like such a pariah that she eventually did start typing out long sentences fully formed (mind you, the content of those was so much drivel, but she was trying) but mostly to complain that we were the weird ones because we insisted on spelling things out in full. Is this truly the state that communication has sunk to? I certainly hope not. The internet was supposed to make it easier for people to talk and share ideas. That is certainly not the case if the generation coming up, being raised on computers in the classroom, can’t spell or use punctuation properly. It’s just wrong.
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