I work with words. And thanks to the proliferation of text box boasting websites, I'll continue to enjoy the job security my peers can only dream of.
Writing needs more than an organ of manipulation beating down on a keyboard. Knowledge of the semantics of a language doesn't make a great piece. There's more to it than grasping syntax. A piece with the right adverbs, nouns, superlatives, and voice, would earn you an 'A' in school. But that's about it.
The real word is all about breaking the rules. Here syntactic expletives are good, too many superlatives aren't. You can grab on to a dangling modifier, and let go of the catch-all terms.
But who am I kidding? You don't know what I am talking about.
And you have text boxes, and cell phones to thank for it.
There's a negative side to accessibility. It's called txtspk. And it's creeping into exams, and 140 word text boxes. The word limit should force you to be creative. But no! It's an excuse for pasting YouTube links, and using single syllables.
It doesn't take long for people to take something breviloquently clever and turn it into something popularly stupid. ASCII art is one. L33t speak is another. What started out as creative expressions of the geeks, are being (ab)used as the slang language of the common.
If you've ever interacted with a "cool kid" on a social network, you know what I'm talking about. They use the "Shift" key only because the colon (:) is above the semi-colon (;). Oh wait. Smiley's always wink. The "Shift" key is obsolete. Capitalization is a shenanigan.
Which is why, as long as red jagged lines underline every word on a social network, I'll proudly label myself a "professional writer".
