By Victor Lipman, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips
Some people bemoan Twitter as hastening the destruction of the English language – compressing and contracting everything into 140 characters – but I have a very different opinion. I say it’s an exceptional tool that can make you a better writer.
No, it’s not about the hashtags. To my way of thinking they’re OK, intriguing but, like eggs, easily overdone. Best used judiciously, with caution.
It’s about the compression and discipline that 140 characters imposes.
Over the years there have been two valuable things I’ve learned about writing. They both came many decades ago (the Pleistocene Era I think it was) when I was an undergraduate at Harvard taking a creative writing course from a professor named Robert O’Meally. (He went by Bob back then.) In his kind soft-spoken way, there were two immutable principles he drilled into us.
Choose literally every word carefully. Every word means every word. Which means going back over what you wrote multiple times and being sure you’re completely satisfied with each word selected. If there’s a better word that can replace another, change it. If there’s a better sentence or paragraph structure, rewrite it.
Make sure there are no extra words in what you write. “No” means not a single one. When you think you’re finished, you’re not. Comb through what you’ve written again; you’re sure to find stragglers, probably lots of them, whose only function is wasting valuable space.
I never did become a fiction writer (wasn’t good enough), and after a decade in journalism ended up working in business most of my career, but those two lessons about word selection and compression always stayed with me. And Twitter is the perfect medium to practice selection and compression. You have no choice.
Sure, Twitter has a ton of chaff out there with the wheat. Can’t tell you how many Tweets have flitted across my Blackberry screen with messages like: “Gotta take a shower now,” or “Just ate scrambled eggs,” or “That stinkin dog keeps barkin.” Those are pithy, but, like, not too interesting. But many gems fly by too. Here are just a few of my favorites.
From Bishop Edward Burns, @BishopBurns: “The best gift a father can give his children is to love their mother. Happy Fathers Day!”
From someone who tweets as the Supreme Leader of North Korea: @KimJongNumberUn: “This is a really hard first job to have.”
From my daughter Bridget @bridgetlipman: “coffee coffee #coffee; so nice i said it thrice.”
From a businessman named Jim Woods @hyperinnovation: “‘There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.’ Tom Peters #leadership”
I hope it’s not a minor lapse of integrity that I included a daughter’s tweet here. But I do like coffee and the way she described it.
And I do like Twitter. For all these reasons and then some.
Oh, one last thing. After I graduated from college we went our separate ways and I never got a chance to tell Professor O’Meally (who went on to a distinguished career at Columbia) how much I appreciated what he taught me and how it remained with me all these years.
So, better now than never, my own small way of repaying a debt. Thank you, Bob. You were the best teacher.
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