Can Twitter Make You a Better Writer ?

All experienced writers know the phrase “less is more” as it relates to the written word.  The first rule of self-editing is to review one’s early drafts and gradually reduce the word count to eliminate unnecessary verbiage that still leaves enough to get the point across.  Whenever I write something, whether an email, technical document, or a blog post, there follows an iterative process of culling and excising unneeded words and phrases and perhaps supplementing what remains with the occasional added emphasis or other revisions. Finally,  I’m left with is something that’s usually 1/3 shorter than the original document and hopefully a clearer, more persuasive argument.

 As I’ve become moderately active on Twitter, I find that the same principle applies.  How many times have any of us tried to send a Tweet that at first extends far beyond 140 characters?  There’s no way to escape the 140 character limit, so the choice is either abandon the Tweet entirely, or edit it to make every word matter.  Reduce or eliminate unneeded adjectives; find one word to replace two; move phrases around and still find away to get your point across.  It’s fine to use intentional misspellings and abbreviations on occasion, e.g., ‘ur’, ‘btw’ - but if more people applied the same amount of criticism and editing to their email messages and work-related documents, we might find a higher degree of quality writing both in and out of the work place.