My Take | Twitter’s plan to extend character limit spells disaster for devotees
Tweets are meant to be brief and concise, and can even be elegant – but longer messages would defeat the whole purpose
Twitter wants to expand its famous 140-character limit on messages to as much as 10,000. That has caused an outcry among its devotees. What’s the point, they ask? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? I am with them all the way.
One tweet from Lab Girl @LeanN_Mean says: “Dear Twitter, Let’s not.”
That’s the kind of brief and concise messages I love about using Twitter.
I don’t know if “leanN mean” refers to Lab Girl’s personality or prose. But the latter is what people should strive at when they write, and tweeting is a good way to practise.
To be sure, many if not most tweets fail to deliver an adequate message within the character limit. But when they succeed, they can be very elegant. A good Twitter writer is like a subeditor well-versed in coming up with brief and clever headlines. They just get right to the point.
One thing about the teaching of English in local schools is that teachers here rarely encourage you to be short and concise in your writing. From my experience, they end up making pupils write wordy and redundant pieces with lots of wasted words. Big and long words are prized, even when they are not well understood and may not fit in context. That’s probably because they require more memory work, something that seems to be an end in itself in local teaching.