The evolution of writing has been swift over the past few decades.
It wasn't all that long ago when students depended on paper and pencil to outline their school papers before typing them and blotting out mistakes with White Out. What a relief for students when word processors became common place and revising a paper became a matter of a few keystrokes.
Today the students' world has exploded. They now can do more writing faster than ever before. Even voice recognition has become reality and allow them to 'dictate' their papers.
Text messaging has replaced old fashion 'talking on the phone'. Abbreviations have sped up the written communication with the likes of OMG, BFF, and LOL. Students are so adept at text messaging that on average they send over 2,200 per month.
Let's not leave out the latest craze, Twittering, where messages are constrained to 140 characters.
What has been left out of the equation with all the writing that today's student do is critical thinking. It's easy to send short text messages (or Tweets) to friends. To use familiar sentence patterns and common language to express thoughts.
Yes, students write more than any other time in history. Unfortunately none of it uses critical thinking.
Blink Fiction combines the brevity of text messaging with critical thinking. It forces the writer to stop and to process what they are want to say and how to say it. Because of the limitation in telling a story in 101 words or less a writer is forced to make their words count, to make their writing vivid and forceful, to use unusual words and metaphors, and to even use an occasional long sentence.
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