'The youth of today can't write' & other lies
August 18, 2020•113 words
In the past 20 years, over 60 billion words of fan fiction have been written and posted on Fanfiction.net, the world’s largest repository. The site’s 10 million members have collectively authored a corpus about three-quarters the size of the entirety of published English-language fiction. This outpouring of creativity has been generated primarily by young people, with a median age of 15.5.
– Cecilia Aragon, MIT Technology Review
Yes, you read that right: people with a median age of just over fifteen have written almost as much text as has ever been published in English. 'The youth of today' can, in fact, write, and they are probably writing more than any previous generation.