Literacy and Length

[Wolfsbane706]

I'd meant to post earlier, but there's a glitch on mobile that locks the browser at the top of the page and prevents down scrolling. That, and I kept forgetting to post via a computer.

Anyway, I'm one of the vast majority that doesn't think literacy is length. I know better. Literacy refers to the quality of your writing, not the quantity. Typically, I'll ask for decent spelling and grammar within about a paragraph and a half. In my "Let Chaos Take Control" RP, I specifically stated that the length requirement (7-8 sentences) was to give the other players something to respond to while not requiring a ridiculous amount of filler just for one post.

My personal opinion on the matter is that if you spot someone using "literate" to refer to length, politely take them aside and explain the difference between the two ideas. If they don't listen, their loss.

 

[Yiyel]

I always said that having the biggest vocabulary is useless if you can't use it properly. Typing paragraphs for the sake of typing paragraphs is something that should be left behind at school. Literacy and length, to me, can be inversely proportional - the more you feel you have to write for a given piece of information, the less truly literate you are. That includes needless exposure - unless relevant to the RP (some character can read thoughts, and so on), I believe other users do not need to know what characters are thinking, as they can't use it in RP and it just adds needless information. We're not writing books - we're writing games, we're writing movies/games/scenes. I can't remember the last time character thoughts were important in these until after the fact, and after the fact it's usually exposed by the character explaining itself.

So the bottom word is, to me the less words there are, the more powerful they get.