My latest article for Visual Thesaurus is about microblogging service Twitter and how it can sharpen your writing and editing skills. Full access for subscribers only; here's a taste:
Limiting yourself to 140 characters or fewer — Twitter will count them for you — warms up your creative muscles, sharpens your writing, and compels every word to pull its weight.
Most of us write the way we talk — with extra words and clauses that provide social lubricant. Classroom essay assignments — "Five hundred words on the Federalist Papers by Monday!" — only worsen the padding habit.
The challenge with Twitter is to get to the point. How can you distill your message most effectively? Which words can you eliminate without losing the meaning?
Once you try it, I'm betting you'll be hooked, as I was. And you'll be in excellent company.
By the way, although I'm mostly keeping politics out of this blog, I'm a lot more opinionated on Twitter. (I kept up a running commentary during last night's Republican National Convention.) Follow my tweets here.
well as you saw, the post inspired me. cheers.
Posted by: Michael | September 04, 2008 at 02:13 PM
@Michael: Nice to see you in the Twittersphere! Stick around; it just gets more interesting.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | September 04, 2008 at 02:22 PM
Sad that it's behind a paywall. :-( (<-- See? I'm sad.)
Posted by: mike | September 04, 2008 at 04:51 PM
@Mike and anyone else: Send me an e-mail and I'll (shhh!) send you the text.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | September 04, 2008 at 08:19 PM