According to "Twitter shares plunge on weak earnings" (2016), social networking giant Twitter has failed to reverse its poor growth record over recent months. Although the latest figures show an increase of 5 million users a month, this is a small number for such a firm and follows on a decline reported three months earlier. The BBC News report says that this has caused worried investors to sell shares in the company, which is trying to compete against more new offerings from Facebook.
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My Yes/No question is:
Do you tweet?
My answer is:
Yes, but mainly passively these days.
I signed up for Twitter many years ago, but rarely used it. Then a couple of years ago I tweeted regularly. I hate writing abbreviated versions of English, so it was challenging, but almost like an artistic endeavour, to write well-formed sentences and ideas in 140 characters or less. My usual writing style is a not particular short, so I think it was also good discipline for me. A couple of other places where I write also impose strict limits on length, which forces me to be much more careful about the word choice to make every word work to communicate with readers.
My professors at university had a much more flexible approach to work limits. When they said 5 - 8 thousand words, I could usually get away with 5+8 thousand, although it was a good idea to get permission first. Busy readers prefer less rather than more words, and good writing makes every word earn its place, which reminds me of my favourite English novel, Jane Austen's 200 year-old masterpiece Pride and Prejudice.
At around 300 pages in my various editions, it's not particularly long as novels go, but Austen makes almost every sentence serve several purposes at the same time: showing her characters, developing the story, entertaining with witty language, and so on. Every word seems perfectly chosen to make brilliant sentence after brilliant sentence, and each sentence works with every other sentence in its paragraph and chapter to unify everything. When we get to the end, we can see how cleverly Austen predicts it in her famous opening sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." It was because they copied Austen's language and story so very faithfully that the BBC production starring Colin Firth (whose name I have trouble remembering - it's more like Mr. Darcy sometimes plays an actor called Colin First who has also played other, less memorable, roles) is so wonderful. It's one of the best TV productions ever made, largely because it copies so carefully from its source.
I wonder what Jane Austen would make of Twitter? Some of her sentences are not short.
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