Okay, so I’m running this contest over at my Dahl site, right? I received about forty entries all together and now I’m trying to decide who wins. I’ve got lots of nice entries from adults, and several good ones from little kids as well. But the writing in the teen age group is just unbelievably bad. I’m not talking about splitting infinitives or misusing participles or anything tricky either. I’m talking about basic spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You know, the stuff most people learn by the sixth grade. These “essays” were almost unreadable. I’ve never seen such run-on sentences in my life. Random words would be capitalized for no apparent reason. One kid actually wrote the word “copetishion” (as in, “competition”). My jaw hit the floor when I saw that one. The nine-year-olds’ entries were so much better! I can’t figure it out. Snookums feels that – as a former County Spelling Bee champion – I’m being prejudiced against people who have difficulty with language and spelling, but I honestly don’t feel like I’m being overly pedantic. This is basic stuff. They’re not dyslexic; they’re just sloppy. Is it that the younger kids are still at an age where teachers care about such things and therefore enforce them? Is it that teenagers just don’t care? Is it that younger kids visiting my site are probably there because they’re precocious readers (and therefore a good writers), and that most teenagers visiting will probably be looking for a book report to scam off the Internet? Or is this just the way it works, and the smart nine-year-olds of today will eventually mutate into the surly illiterate fourteen-year-olds of tomorrow? I hate to sound so cynical, but you wouldn’t believe these e-mails. Are these sub-literates representative of high schoolers today, Max? I sure as hell hope not.