Good Twittering/Bad Twittering

image credit: Julie Berlin

For the sake of brevity

Twittering in just 140 characters is an art. The challenge is to be succinct, interesting and informative or funny in one go. The goal is to spark a thought or prompt a reaction.

Good Twittering is like good subbing: drawing out interesting quotes, writing provocative headlines and framing a thought or a perspective.

All told, I’d estimate that with each Tweet you have around a second to catch a person’s attention. And if you fail repeatedly, you’ll just end up being ignored.

And as Twitter has grown, a new language has sprung up alongside it: clever ways of passing a message on quickly and effectively.

Some of the best have even forged their own individual style; one example of which would be @jemimakiss who regularly mimics the odd phrasing of the “I Can Has Cheezburger” website.

The FAIL game

More irritatingly, however, have been the appearance of Twitter clichés. Any regular user will quickly notice them and they are becoming more frequent. I’ll sketch three which annoy me here:

Firstly, people have started to carve each news story up into one of two categories: fails or wins (who knew that analysis could be so simple?).

It’s a simple formula: find a news story that you like and plant the word WIN (and possibly an explanation mark) next to it; if you don’t like the story, all you have to do is replace WIN with FAIL. It’s a terrible habit, and one which is getting increasingly popular.

Another favourite is to prefix a link to an opinion article with the phrase “what s/he said” – a very effective construction that only becomes annoying when you see it fifteen times a day.

Finally, and this is the one which will one day prompt me to great violence – is people going “nom, nom, nom” at lunchtime.

These are ways of sidestepping the linguistic challenge of writing something intelligible and fresh in just 140 characters. They are signs of bad Twittering in just the same way that “economic climate” and the “green shoots of recovery” would be symptomatic of stale financial journalism.

With all the fuss about Twitter as a platform or a medium (or whatever the hell it is), we might as well start thinking about what makes a bad tweet. And what doesn’t.