Precision Writing Through Twitter at 12:21 AM

A maximum of 140 characters for a single post on Twitter, referred to as a tweet, has some feeling a bit limited. Condensing information to answer "What are you doing" for a social networking site can be overwhelming. Yet it's Twitter's purpose to simplify internet clutter to bite-size chunks.

By restricting status updates to short blurbs all in one central place, Twitter helps facilitate the summarization of messages coming in from friends, bloggers, news stations, companies, celebrities, etc. Instead of reading and writing lengthy entries like on a blog, Twitter emphasizes to-the-point posts called microblogging.

A general rule for many written works is to keep everything brief cutting out any wordiness. Going on and on concerning a single topic can be dull and repetitive. The 140 character limitation for Twitter posts forces its users to ultimately practice trimming down sentences to the bare essentials.

As an individual willing and eager to share my thoughts to the world, I associate with numerous social networks constantly looking for the next new way to communicate. Although I am a member of Facebook, Tumblr, among other sites, none have challenged my writing abilities as much as Twitter. Being an active member of Twitter, I have gained a better sense of what needs to be said in contrast to what can be said. Reworking sentences to fit in the space provided is, in a sense, training me to come up with creative ways of wording phrases.

Admittedly, my experience isn't the one everyone shares. Many Twitter users resort to abbreviating words such as "u" in place of "you" or "gr8" instead of "great." This sort of perversion of the English language is quite common on the internet referred to as "txtspk" (text speak). Similar to Twitter, texting, where most of the txtspk language came from, is limited to only 160 characters per message. In order to save money on the cell phone bill people utilized txtspk to cram as much information into a single SMS message as possible. Since Twitter is proud to offer the feature of using SMS to update one's status on-the-go, the practice was passed on to the microblogging site as a means to save followers from the annoyance of receiving multiple tweets.

Despite those members who do not use proper spelling and grammar, Twitter can be a unique learning tool for anyone seeking some encouragement to explore various syntax. My writing has certainly improved in precision thanks to Twitter's ingenious system of quick occasional posts.