Alas, we’re all going to end up writing like they did in the book “Brave New World”, instead of like John Milton. The first line of his epic “Paradise Lost” has 135 WORDS, and goodness knows how many characters.

Frondly, Fern

Also, I’m inclined to disagree with the mashed-potato comparison (or maybe I just don’t understand it – what does “finish up while it’s hot” really mean?) A piece of writing that expresses a complex idea can really be improved by meticulous sculpting – especially with input from people whose grasp of that idea is different from yours.

Twitter forces you to eschew the useless adverb, and to look a little harder to replace a 3- or 4-word phrase with a single nugget. Plus it gives you instant feedback. If I drop what turns out to be a particularly memorable line (@GregVegas, by the way), reTweets tell me something that I’d never be objective enough to learn on my own.

Which ties into the “Winning on the Uphills” link. Being forced to type in 140-character strings isn’t quite the same as being forced to get by on a 40% pay cut, but it does make you do more with what you’ve got.

That’s an incredibly sweeping generalization, one that puts blame on the tool instead of blaming the writer.

Saying that Twitter and texting do nothing to add to written skills is no different than saying paper and pen do nothing to add to written skills because people use notepads to doodle and make lists that are useless to anyone else.

People Tweeting about their lunch or texting “LOL” are poor reflections on the communicator, not on the tool itself.

Twitter has the 140 character limit because it was designed to be used with text messaging in mind. Text message has a 160 character limit. Twitter allows you to have up to 20 characters in your screen name, so you can easily send and receive twitter message through your phone.

Here’s an article about why text messages have the 160 character limit. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html It’s not arbitrary at all, as a lot of thought and research went into that.

Not necessarily. If that were the case, there would be a lot of brilliant stuff on Twitter. Most is just junk, not to mention a lot of stupid abbreviations. Truly good writing on Twitter? NOT!

Being concise and brief? Always worthwhile goals, in general. But if you look at some of the greatest writers (fiction and non-fiction, contemporary and historical) in all genres, few, if any, could survive in a Twitter generation. (Of course, the fact that so many people have severely limited attention spans might also have something to do with the decline in reading and reading skills for so many.)

It’s not how many characters you use, Twitter or not, it’s what you say and how you say it. Content.

One of the problems today is that people can text and Twitter, but they can’t compose a sentence, are clueless about grammar and have limited vocabularies. Life cannot always be condensed into a headline or 140 characters (and, I wonder, why 140???? Not 130 or 145 or 160? I mean come on, who made this arbitrary rule and why are so many unthinking people following it?)

Verbal and written communications skills are lacking in the general populace. Twitter and texting do nothing to grow these skills. If anything, they take away from them.

I’m building an emergency fund for the first time, and while I have it in an online bank account so I don’t see it as often, I still find myself tempted to use that money for other important – but not emergency – activities.