Write It Well

In a memo this week, Standards Editor Phil Corbett of the New York Times asked the organization’s writers to avoid the word tweet in most news articles. (A tweet is a message on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Corbett’s rationale is that at the Times,

we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” – as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter – is all three….

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords…. let’s look for deft, English alternatives [to "tweet"]: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update.

In this case, we disagree with the words “jargon” and “deft.” Whether a word is jargon can depend on audience knowledge. We do advise against using recently coined words like tweet without a definition if your readers are unlikely to know them. But it doesn’t take much space to explain that “A tweet is a Twitter post” or that “Tweeting means writing on Twitter.”

The noun tweet is one short word. In comparison, “Twitter message” and “Twitter update” are unnecessarily long, formal, and clumsy phrases. We find it more deft and concise to define the word tweet and then use it freely.

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Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

Write It Well’s Natasha Terk, author of Writing Performance Reviews, was on the air live on Public Radio International (PRI) on Tuesday, June 15th, at 6:47 a.m. EST. The Takeaway show’s cohost John Hockenberry spoke with Natasha and with Samuel Culbert, author of Get Rid of the Performance Review. Listen to the interview on The Takeaway‘s website, or in the player here!

Retweeting is when a Twitter user clicks a link to add someone else’s tweet to their own Twitter stream. (A tweet is a post on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Retweeting is a way of telling your own Twitter followers, “This tweet is worthwhile.” The “RT” letters at the start of the following Twitter post are a signal that Mary Cullen (M_Cullen) retweeted  (RTed) the following post by Jason Fried (jasonfried):

RT @jasonfried: Jargon is insecurity.

At Write It Well, we’re big fans of plain English over jargon. Jargon in business writing can be a sign of insecurity, or a way to overinflate a simple message to make it look more substantial.

We also admire concise writing. If M_Cullen hadn’t RTed jasonfried’s tweet, we would have missed this pithy, well-phrased statement.

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Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

It’s usually best to avoid all-capital typing for e-mails, text messages, and tweets. It looks like you’re shouting. But check out these two tweets from the New Yorker, about an hour apart, with the time frames of  ”coming up” and then “NOW“:

Is college worth the price?:http://tny.com/cxoTFm; join the live chat at 12 ET, or ask a question now:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Is college worth the price? Join our live chat RIGHT NOW:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Twitter updates constantly. This uppercase “RIGHT NOW” is a case of genuine urgency: join in now, or lose out! If you followed the New Yorker‘s tweets, you’d see they’re carefully written and that this is almost the only uppercase typing they use for an entire page.

We’d say that if you regularly write clear, well-planned tweets, then some all-caps writing is fine. Just deploy it very strategically. If you save uppercase typing to highlight rare, urgent situations, then you won’t look like you’re crying (or tweeting) wolf!

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For a fun, unique case of all-capital tweeting, see FEMINIST HULK‘s page on Twitter.

Also see our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on the site. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!

All this month’s blog posts will be about maintaining a professional image on Twitter. First up is a tweet from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Twitter account:

Win 8 $100 gift certificates to participating Dine About Town restaurants. Details and contest entry at: http://sfg.ly/doQSZj

At 125 characters (with spaces), this tweet is short and sweet. It’s 15 characters under Twitter’s maximum 140-character limit. With this extra space to burn, we’d suggest two changes.

First, no colon is necessary after “at,” since you’d write “it’s at this webpage” instead of ”it’s at: this webpage.” Also, it might be clearer to spell out the number 8. Winning “eight $100″ certificates would be more immediately clear than “8 $100″ ones.

When you have the space, standard punctuation and full spellings make most tweets clearer.

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See our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on Twitter. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!