Can Twitter improve your writing?

Jun 01 2010

Writing brief messages in 140 characters or less doesn’t seem like much, yet Twitter has built a social networking empire doing just that. I came to Twitter fairly late in the game, after much persuading by some other social-saavy friends/family. The more I use Twitter, the more I wonder: Is this improving my writing?

The most obvious answer, and the one I agree with, is yes, Twitter can improve your writing. You are forced to use words selectively and make you 140 character messages as concise as possible. A lot of writers have a problem of being too wordy. It’s a hard habit to break and writers don’t see it in their own work. They only notice their wordiness when someone points it out to them in a draft.

With Twitter, there is no room to be wordy. For example, I’ll think of some great idea I want to tweet about, only to be disappointed that when written out, it goes way over the 140 character limit. So I find myself cutting out words, using shorter words, getting rid of unnecessary punctuation and so forth. It can be a lot of work to get a tweet just right.

When I did a quick Google search on this subject, I came across this post from Copyblogger. In part, the post says:

Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you’re forced to dust off your dictionary and thesaurus and find new words to use—Words that are shorter, words that are more descriptive, and words that get the job done in 140 characters or less.

While I have never used my dictionary or thesaurus, I do have to carefully choose my words. But changing a word can be tricky as it can alter the meaning of what you want to say, sometimes in very subtle ways. For example, the words “good” (4 letters) and “great” (5 letters) might seem like a good substitute if you need to shave off one character. But if you’re linking to the best book of the century on Amazon, you’ll want to say the book is great, not just good.

My only issue with Twitter is that a lot of people will revert back to writing like they are going 2 txt msg their bff on their phone and use very annoying abbreviations. These type of shortcuts are only a crutch in place of working on editing your tweets down. But from what I have observed, people on Twitter who use social networking for business and marketing tend to avoid such texting lingo.

Do you think Twitter helps your writing? Give your reasons in the comments below.

3 Responses

I don’t know if it helped with writing, but it has definitely forced me to re-write my sentences quite a few times. Also, something that was a good practice was posting jokes. Trying to cramp a set-up and a punchline into 140 characters often force me to rewrite it a few times and sometimes I do come up with way more clever ways than the original.
Kelvin Kao´s last blog ..Barked at a Dog Today

Kelvin Kao 6/2/2010 1:34 am
It has truly improved my writing by forcing me to say much simply in few words. To had to your good blog, I’d add that it also helps cut down on jargon.
Robyn McMaster´s last blog ..Listening Beams from the other Side of Questions

Robyn McMaster 6/6/2010 6:58 am
To be honest I don’t know if Twitter improved my writing skills. It certainly exposed me to other writers and it’s a great source of links to articles and posts about the writing craft. Those help me.

But Twitter? Yes, rephrasing my thoughts to fit the 140 characters limit is often challenging. But those changes and revisions don’t really influence the way I write my longer pieces.
Jane Rutherford´s last blog ..Guest Posting?

Jane Rutherford 6/6/2010 8:28 am