Why Twitter Will Make You a Better Writer
Twitter gives you 140 characters to say something. 140. [To give you an idea of how short that is, I'm at 143 as of the end of this paragraph.]
With a blog or your website, you have space. Space to write however much you want. But Twitter forces us into a rectangular box of limited characters. Adding another person’s handle? Go ahead. Including a link? Have at it. But it’ll cost you a few characters.
The good news?
With so few characters, you’re bound to tighten up your writing. Can you really include all of those “…”s? Should you drop the “LOL” on the end of your tweet? Maybe it’s time to learn what “FWIW”, “NSFW”, and “FTW” really mean so that you can stop wasting precious characters spelling them out.
I joke, but Twitter will help you write sharper, clearer, and more concisely. Tweeting will help you think more about what you’re writing and cut out all of the fluff that doesn’t matter.
The better news?
People will actually take the few seconds to read what you’ve written. With a website or blog, you’ve got skimmers. But on Twitter, people know that reading your tweet won’t take a whole 5 minutes of their precious time. It’ll take 5 seconds.
The catch: make sure you tweet things worth reading so you don’t get tuned out…or worse, unfollowed.
Nicki Hicks
Follow me to see if I can keep it short and sweet
Tags: Twitter