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    How to improve your writing skills with Twitter


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The world of social networks is constantly growing, and the opportunities these services offer us are always new and challenging. Many of us, for instance, have a Twitter account, be it for work or simply for fun.

Beyond keeping you updated with your friends and/or colleagues’ activities and being a great marketing tool, have you ever thought that Twitter is the ideal place to improve your writing skills?

Jennifer Blanchard, a well-known American copywriter, is sure about it, and she explains why the famous microblogging site is the perfect “writing gym” in her interesting article How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer.

Here are the three challenges of Twitter.

Concision. The maximum limit of characters (not words!) is 140. Letters, numbers, symbols, spaces, punctuation: all these count as characters. Many writers (and not only) tend to be quite verbose: forget long descriptions and complex sentences, your keyword must be brevity! Whatever you message, you need to know exactly what to say and most important of all how to say it in as few words as possible.

Widen your vocabulary. Concision brings you to look for new words, which must be shorter, descriptive and get you immediately to the point. Adverbs and verbs will be replaced with verbs, and many words you normally use will be too long: dictionary at hand, you will dust off your vocabulary to make your message more incisive.

Editing skills. Hitting 140 characters right away is not always as easy as it might seem. Everybody using Twitter has rewritten their message at least once because the original was too long. Rewriting is fundamental to improve your editing skills, a very important part in the writing process for every writer or aspiring one. Twitter forces you to be concise: the challenge lays not only in shortening and cutting, but also in being able to keep the meaning and the aim of the message intact, making it inspiring and winning so that your followers will click on your link or “retweet” your post.

If you still haven’t a Twitter account, what are you waiting for? Create yours now and start exercising your writing! ;)

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INFO ARTICLE & PHOTO

Written by Marta, September 2008.

Article inspired by How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer written by Jennifer Blanchard.

Credits: Image by Smashing Magazine, designed by Mirjami Manninen

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