posted by: Tara

What is Twitter? Is it an online website where users share both useful and pointless tweets? Is it a publishing of commentary online that makes a great place for businesses and marketers? Is it a place that I could actually groom my writing skills?

The answer to all of these questions is YES! Yes, you heard me correctly...and my main focus is how Twitter makes both me and you better writers.

If you’re familiar with Twitter, you will already know that you have 140 characters to share at a time. Key word: characters. That’s not words—or even letters alone, and it’s definitely not a lot of room.

Twitter’s 140 characters would fall with letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces.

Many writers, including myself, are verbose and can often have too long of sentences that draw too far out. Creating a message that’s only 140 characters long can be pretty tough, so you have to be concise.

Being concise compels you to exercise your vocabulary—remember you only have 140 characters to get your message across. So, toss that dictionary, and dig deep to find fresh words—words that are modern, descriptive, short and get to the point. THINK WORD COUNT. People hate reading anything that’s more than 70 words long, and you only have 140 characters to utilize.

And we all know how important editing is. By using Twitter you can really pump-up and polish your editing skills, making them untouchable. Imagine your tweet is a little puzzle. Think hard and push deep into your vocabulary, because this allows us to piece together the limited use of words and vocalize the big picture.

 Remember, a good writer always keeps it short, simple and stimulating, and for that I would like to say “Thank you Twitter”.

• August 27th, 2010
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• Tags: alberta, calgary, marketing, twitter, website