National Novel Wring Month Is Here!

It's here! National Novel Writing Month has begun. 30 days, 50,000 words....how did I let myself get talked into this? I'll be out of town for at least 7 days, not to mention one weekend spent in class. We'll see how far I actually get. I've noticed some blogs with a counter on them, displaying how many of their total word count has been accomplished. Right now, I think it'd be pretty depressing to see that big fat "0." In a few days, though...well, we'll just see how much I can get from my brain to the computer. This should be fun, if I can just make myself be disciplined enough to sit down and write. And speaking of writing: I found this little tidbit interesting, and it's short enough to just put the entire thing here. I knew that IM was good for me!:

"For a while, you couldn't go a month without seeing yet another story in some newspaper with certain teachers complaining that students were letting "txting" speak appear in their writing -- leaving the teachers worried about the English skills of today's youth. However, as those stories became more popular, people began to notice they were almost all anecdotal. In fact, some people began to point out that all of this writing by kids could actually help them have a better command of the language than in times past, when many kids did almost no writing at all. Finally, in 2003, omeone did some research and found that, indeed, kids were actually much more comfortable writing than in the past. While they might experiment with using txting speak or alternative forms of language, they generally learned pretty quickly what was appropriate at what time. Obviously, not everyone gets it right all the time, but the stories of the complete destruction of kids' language abilities has been overstated. It appears that now there's even more research to support this. The latest research does show that kids are better writers than in the past ("using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling") but are still more likely to let the occasional txting shorthand slip into their writing."