If you use Twitter as a social media tool, you probably don’t think it helps your writing. It does. Here’s why.
When you must put a thought, sentence or paragraph into 140 characters, it forces you to remove useless words. If you are ready to post and it shows you are over the letter limit, you have to go back, think what you can cut, then eliminate those words or letters.
Doing this, forces you to consider how you write and can over-write. You have no other choice.
Moving away from Twitter, keep in mind that you can almost always find words in your professional or personal writing that don’t add to your thought or sentence. When you edit, a good exercise is to use a character limit, similar to Twitter, and you’ll find yourself more aggressively chopping.
You don’t always need to parse your communications. Ponderous and creative sentences and paragraphs have their place, and some issues just can’t be explained in short bursts. But when you face a need to cut, like the 140-character limit the Twitter imposes on its users, that’s a valuable training tool to keep in mind on your other writing projects.
When you must put a thought, sentence or paragraph into 140 characters, it forces you to remove useless words. If you are ready to post and it shows you are over the letter limit, you have to go back, think what you can cut, then eliminate those words or letters.
Doing this, forces you to consider how you write and can over-write. You have no other choice.
Moving away from Twitter, keep in mind that you can almost always find words in your professional or personal writing that don’t add to your thought or sentence. When you edit, a good exercise is to use a character limit, similar to Twitter, and you’ll find yourself more aggressively chopping.
You don’t always need to parse your communications. Ponderous and creative sentences and paragraphs have their place, and some issues just can’t be explained in short bursts. But when you face a need to cut, like the 140-character limit the Twitter imposes on its users, that’s a valuable training tool to keep in mind on your other writing projects.