Last week, I took on the task of unpacking my book boxes and filling the new bookshelves. As I separated the volumes into fiction and non, I flipped through a few of the titles. I opened George Eliot’s Middlemarch and noticed that the first paragraph extends halfway through the second page of text, it suddenly dawned on me why I was three hundred pages into the novel before I finally felt the fog of confusion lifting. In the twenty-first century, we don’t write like that anymore.
Eliot starts off pretty well, with the sentence, “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” But after that, Eliot breaks off into a tangent about blessed virgins and Italian painters, and if you’re like me, easily distracted by a toddler or the conversation of people at the next table, you’re probably lost after a couple of lines. Eliot, like Dickens and James and other writers of her time, lived in a time when readers were often willing to invest time in 800 page novels filled with semi-colon laden paragraphs.
We twenty-first-century readers, who often turn to the internet for our news and to blogs for our reading material, often aren’t as willing to figure out what Eliot’s actually saying in all of those dependent clauses. Last year I signed up for Twitter, just as I’d signed up for a blog five years ago when the blog craze hit. I know that many people disparage Twitter. “How can anyone say anything worth saying in 140 characters?”
It’s true, most Tweets are pretty lame, but they don’t have to be. When I started Twittering (or is it Tweeting?) mine usually were along the lines of “unloading groceries– excited for the new ice cream I bought.” Short enough, sure, but also pretty boring to anyone who isn’t a) going to eat the ice cream with me or b) my mother. Much like blogging, there’s an art to Tweeting. Here’s what I usually do:
1) Write about things I’m thinking about or commentary on what I’m doing, rather than just report on what I’m doing, which is usually pretty boring.
2) Write everything I want to say in the little Twitter box, then go through and cut and cut until it’s as short as it has to be.
3) Read lots of Tweets, because becoming familiar with the genre is a great way to getting better at writing anything worth writing (are Tweets worth writing?).
The great thing is that writing with a 140-character limit has made me pay attention to being more concise as I write. Even when I’m not writing in a tiny box on my computer screen, I now often go back and delete unnecessary words and rework phrases so they’re as streamlined as possible. I even find that I’m blogging less, because sometimes I can express in 140 characters or less the same ideas it took 300 or 400 words to get out on my blog.
Consider this Tweet:
“A child who exclaims ‘it’s ruined’ as she surveys her wet dress should really be potty trained.”
In the past I probably would have blogged about the experience, but I hope that the 100-something-character sentence encapsulates the thought that I have a kid who is precocious in many ways, but it’s clinging steadfastly to her diapers. And also that I feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough to actually do the potty training. See, now wasn’t that easy?
Even if you never plan to Tweet, sign up for Twitter. You’ll see the good, the bad and the ugly of what the 140-character format can squeeze out of writers. And besides, you can get great updates from Segullah.
So Twitter, love it? Hate it? Why? If you’re a Twitterer, what are your tricks of the trade when it comes to writing Tweets?
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