I received and email from WhiteSmoke software today.  I get a daily mailing from them containing tips, tricks and specials. For some reason, this one caught my eye.

Are they serious?  As you get older you allegedly write less and less? 

Back in the 60s I certainly wrote more than the average 16 to 25 year old, cranking out sheets of erasable paper on my typewriter. But that could never match the output of a 56 year old B.L. armed with multiple computers.  Of course this is a question of hours spent writing, not words generated. So let me think about that for a few minutes.  
In college years, I would spend about 3 hours writing a 1500 word essay properly formatted for submission.  I wrote maybe two or three such papers a month coupled with 5 or 6 handwritten letters of maybe 500 words and an hour each.  Lets throw in a speech or two every month and we are looking at a maximum of 21 hours a month.  
Now, 35 years later I easily spend that much time every week crafting emails, presentations, and documentation.  Add to this, blogging, scripting, and noveling and some weeks, I probably double that mark.

So, if this survey is to be believed, for every one of me, there are dozen or so over 50 not writing a word.  Additionally, those 16-35 year olds out there are either sending a whole lot of  TXT MSGS or they are cranking out ALL the Novels, TV Shows, Movies and News Stories we see…maybe it’s both and they are tweeting the next War and Peace right now. 

I like WhiteSmoke and I won’t hold these bogus facts against them. However their software  is not working correctly with the Microsoft Internet Explorer version 8 that was automatically installed for me and apparently can’t be uninstalled.  I would write a letter of complaint to both of them, but apparently I am way over my quota of words for this year.