How Twitter Has Helped My Writing

By Jenni Hammitt

April 28, 2009

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Twitter has improved my writing…no really it has. It has made me work harder and be more focused on my business. I know Twitter doesn’t seem like an obvious writing aide, but it has helped make a difference in my writing.

Of course, I joined Twitter to network and to direct more traffic towards my work. I’m not a huge blogger, and the words “social media guru/expert” make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon, but I have started to make good connections. That has driven more traffic to my blog and other work. That has also made me more motivated to keep creating new material. It also pushes my inner perfectionist to create a better product.

It also gets me writing. I get new ideas directly and indirectly from the people I follow. Sometimes the discussions we have or comments that are made just send my mind off in the right direction. When the writer’s block is hitting hard it is nice to have a resource. It also gives me more feedback. Now I have more people letting me know the things I do well along with the things I’m not doing so well.

My fiction work has also benefited from Twitter. I joke that I take a little piece of each person I meet and put it into a character or a storyline. Twitter introduces me to many different types of people and ideas. It gives me a bigger pool of ideas, personalities and observations to work with. I love having the new perspectives and vibrant personalities to help me bring my ideas to life.

The last reason Twitter has helped my writing was an unexpected side effect. As an English teacher, I am always telling my students that the best way to write is to be precise and concise. Say what you need to say in the shortest and most direct way possible. Take a look at a sentence word by word. If the word isn’t integral to the meaning or the grammatical structure, it doesn’t need to be there. I strive to meet that standard myself. Twitter is helping me practice my own rules. With Twitter, I only have 140 characters to say what I need to say.

Now while Twitter is almost as bad as texting in throwing punctuation out the window, the character limit forces me to be short and to the point. If a tweet is too long, it is time to cut out the fluff.
Actually…maybe I can start using Twitter as a tool in my classroom…