Twitter and the Art of Prolixity

If the great Will Strunk were still alive, the current state of the English language might render him mute.  #Twitter, Txt msgs, and Facebook reward brevity.  But they often mangle language, leaving sentences and words looking like plastic yard toys in a lawn mower’s wake. 

I love social media, but what happens when social media conventions creep into the classroom? Worse yet, what do you do when they pop up in students’ writing?  A year and a half ago I taught an Intro to Political Theory class titled: Investigating Democracy.   One evening, I received a short email from a student.  The message was in all caps, followed by a string of strange and angry emoticons: HELP >:o.  His final papers didn't look much different.  This student struggled with the material – in a good way – but he also struggled to communicate his ideas.  At first, I didn't know what to make of his writing style.   But then I realized if it had been a text message or even a string of tweets, it would have made perfect sense.   

I spent a good deal of time that semester marking up drafts and helping him to bring his writing in line with traditional conventions.  It wasn't till the end of the semester that I started to consider an alternative approach.  Rather than take traditional writing conventions as a starting point, what if I started with Twitter.  In other words, is it possible to find common with students to connect and talk about good writing? After all, the skills required to craft good tweets are at least as old as…well…Strunk and White’s maxims: Prefer the active voice to the passive; avoid unnecessary words; order sentences for emphasis, etc.

Good tweets jump like a fish out of the rolling twitter stream; they provoke laughter, disgust, empathy.  But more than that, they make you want to read more.  In other words, a good tweet has the same effect as a good title, a good topic sentence, a good lead paragraph. 

This semester, teaching Methods and Interpretation, I turn back to Twitter again and again.  Before students submit their final papers, I often ask them distill their argument into 140 character tweet…with one difference: they have to use pen and paper #OldSchool.

@EdwardErikson