Grammer and Smarts - My Niagara Response

I wish I could write like Mark Twain. Although he uses enormous words, quite a few you don’t understand and plenty you’ve never heard, he keeps you entertained even if you are a slight bit confused. I laugh at things I’m not sure I understand, and he has my favorite kind of sarcastic humor. The things he said to the supposed Indians, and his last paragraph on his fatal injuries, made me love the essay.

He inspires me to go read the dictionary to expand my vocabulary, and not just the encyclopedias [yes, true story. I used to read through the encyclopedias when I was young]. It makes me want to be smarter, so I can write smarter. He also inspires me to be more humorous in my writing. I aspire to make my readers laugh and relate while reading my writings. 

I miss this quality of writing. In this era of facebooking and texting and emailing, nothing sounds even close to his Niagra ramblings.

“Wht up w u? im gnna b @ concrt”

“hey brb in 2 sec”

“idk wht 2 think”

Although I might be slightly confused, I’m definitely not entertained at the same time. Half the time I pick up a kids book to read to my siblings I wonder what pre-schooler wrote this one. Or when I read someone’s comment on facebook, and I have to go over it three times to understand what they are saying due to lack of punctuation and misspelt words, I have to think, are we really that dumb? Or are we that lazy?

[If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might wonder if it’s a plot to dumb us down, so we don’t realize a few people are planning on taking over the world, but I’m not. Or maybe I am. There are more ridiculous thoughts. ]

I could now get started on about people’s punctuation and grammar, oh and their lack of capitalization [that one really gets me, really guys? It’s that much harder to write “I” instead of “i”?], but the real reason we started this was to like improve our righting so I should proly stop here for i expose my lack of smartness.  ;)