Can Twitter Make You a Better Writer?

Yesterday, I found a blog posting entitled How Twitter Makes You a Better Writer. “Absurd” I thought, and read on with the sole purpose of feeling superior at the end. As the existence of this blog posting might imply, I was wrong. Not only does the author, Jennifer Blanchard, make some great points, she draws parallels between Twitter and an author I have great respect for, William Zinsser. Hmmm…color me confuted.

Blanchard’s three points were these:
· Twitter forces you to be concise – you have 140 characters to make your point.
· Twitter forces you to exercise your vocabulary – you need shorter words, and powerful verbs cut the need for adverbs and adjectives.
· Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills – you have 140 characters to make a point that people will want to retweet. Your first go will be great at 152 characters but that’s no good. It will need to be pruned.

Now read this passage from Zinsser’s On Writing Well:

“But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word. Every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb…these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”

Zinsser, via Thoreau, insists that we need to “simplify, simplify” and it seems that Twitter might be a way to get good at it. Who would have thought? I haven’t always been the biggest fan of Twitter – too many disappointments from the people I follow (a comedian putting on his socks is no more funny than me putting on mine, it turns out) but Twitter as a tool for crafting better writing? I can see that, and I definitely have more respect for it now.