I have long loved using twitter to improve my writing skills. It fits my many guidelines for being a better communicator.
- I am able to make a game of it. Where else must a writer follow a specific rule – well – in order to succeed (and still have a good time)? I make tweeting into a game. How to choose the richest words in the fewest space? Go!
- Revision is what makes it fun. Wait – I thought we creatives weren’t driven by rewrites. Unless…. we actively trick ourselves into thinking revising is actually yet another first draft!
- Twitter teaches us to let go, to try again, to splatter word-paint recklessly without fear because the feed will gobble it up quickly, anyway!
With twitter, you are gifted a space of 140 characters to make your point. That’s the sweet and savory version of twitter in a nutshell.
You may also add images with twitter, which subtract about 20 or so characters. Oh, and you may also drive traffic to your website or blog with a link – and you may shorten your link using bit.ly or is.gd or any url shortener and only lose… 20 or so more characters.
You may add words to your images if you are a word-nerd who is unable to control herself OR if you simply adding more of an oomph or to stay with bird imagery, a bit of a grackle or a lark or a jay to your tweet.
I have even added some sample tweets here with a large number of characters left for your creative play.
What do you think of them?
How would you rank them?
What might you tweet instead?
Those who tweet well, write well. (103 characters left)
How is a tweet like a beautifully crafted poem? (85 characters left)
Emily Dickinson would have loved being an anonymous Tweeter. (73 characters left)
I invite you to play along, to share your own tweets, and most of all to have a good time as you craft concise, enjoyable, poetic and terse tweets that will make a difference for you in your life work or simply in your life play.
And here, watch the Periscope Video that launched this blog post:
<P.
Recent Comments