I have yet to master it, but I like Twitter. It has lots of possibilities.
Besides making the world smaller and easier to communicate with, Twitter forces brevity. One hundred and forty characters, including spaces. That is all you have. For writers like me—I think of myself as closer to a minimalist than the other end of the spectrum—the challenge to pare down the message to the essentials is always a fun one.
Consider:
What time do you think you will be home? What’s for dinner. We haven’t had spaghetti with mushrooms in a while. Let’s go out for coffee tonight.
To many characters—146 to be exact. Let’s try again.
Your ETA home? What’s for dinner. How bout sketti and shrooms ? Go out for coffee tonight.
That’s ninety-one characters. Much better for Twitter.
The danger is that this abbreviated speech creeps into the vernacular. Soon someone will respond to an email from the CEO with:
K.
That will be appreciated about as much as a fart in an elevator.
Enjoy Twitter. Embrace its demand for you to be brief and to the point. Don’t get sloppy, though, and don’t start dragging twitterspeak into your other written communications.
See ya’ later.
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