If brevity is the soul of wit, Twitter is the soul of brevity. As you should all know by now, Twitter is a web service that allows users to post brief messages, called tweets. “Brief” may actually be insufficient to describe a tweet – miniscule is more like it. Each tweet is limited to 140 characters.
Not 140 words, 140 characters.
I use twitter for all sorts of reasons – to share news stories that interest me, to promote my practice, to comment on current events, to crack jokes, to network, and, yes, sometimes to tell you all what I am eating. Twittter’s 140 character limit has forced me to convey some complex thoughts in very few words. That has made me a generally better writer.
It reminds me of the scene from A River Runs Through It where young Norman Maclean is taught composition by his father, a Scots Presbyterian minister (I looked for a video – nada). Three times Norman turned his work over to his father, marvelously portrayed by Tom Skerrit. Three times a red pen would cross out unnecessary words, and his father would hand it back to Norman saying “again, half as long.” Only on his fourth attempt does the essay pass muster, a fraction of its original length.
I tweet using a similar process. I begin by writing the full sentence, complete with my tendency to overpuncuate and pad the sentence with modifiers. If the sentence is longer than 140 characters, I remove unnecessary modifiers and excessive commas. A ten letter word might be replaced by a six letter synonym. With some effort 140 meaningful characters emerge, and it is usually better than the original.
Obviously, a brief is much longer than a tweet, but if you treat each sentence as a tweet, your writing will be stronger and sharper. I have yet to meet a writer, legal or otherwise, whose first drafts do not contain needless adjectives or unecessarily long words. Remember the advice of a Scots Prebyterian minister, “Again, half as long.”