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From Telegraph to Twitter: The Language of the Short Form

By Roy Peter Clark

I guess you could say that I'm a late adopter. I have no Facebook account. I remain skeptical of PowerPoint presentations. My favorite technology is still the book, although my new iPhone is catching up fast. I admit it: I still write the occasional essay in longhand.

But something nifty (an old school word) happened a few months ago when my friends at Poynter Online uploaded the podcasts for my book "Writing Tools" on iTunes U. Before you know it, those little audio essays were number 1 with a bullet, with close to a million downloads. O, Brave New World ...

Now filled with confidence -- and with the help of my much younger Poynter colleagues -- I set off on my first Twitter experience. It did not take long to learn the basics, and I now have about 170 "followers" (I prefer "acolytes") and a couple dozen tweets under my feathers.

My primary motivation was not to grow an audience or to keep up with the latest, but to pursue my interest in short forms of writing.

Captured on the shore
a chorus line of horseshoe crabs
unlucky in love.

--@RoyPeterClarkTwitter is made to order. With its limit of 140 characters, it encouraged one sentence, or a couple of short ones, or a string of fragments, with the appropriate abbreviations and liturgies for linking. Let it be said that Twitter, unlike the gods of haiku, does not offer itself as primarily a "writing" vehicle. But one person's short message is another person's genre. And genres, all English majors know, have certain requirements and certain unimagined potential. So off I go on a search for what I'll mischievously call "The Grammar of Twitter."

Not everyone gets Twitter. Radio talk show host Jim Rome has predicted that Twitter, a favorite of athletes, would soon flame out as a fad. He looks forward to that day, he said, because sites like Twitter "have set back the English language 100 years." He referred to the "lazy" shortcuts required to pare a message down to 140 characters, the limit for a so-called tweet. By shortcuts, he meant the way that a message such as "Before you hate why not be great!" could become "B4 U h8 Y not b gr8!" On another occasion, Rome ridiculed the self-indulgent sharing of the humdrum details of daily life enabled by Twitter: "I'm sitting on the couch. Pillow lumpy. Life sucks"

No doubt, the language of the license plate and the navel gaze have influenced the abbreviated messages required for some forms of online communication. But rather than hate such forms or imagine that they somehow set back the language -- as if anything could -- why not explore the potential of new forms of expression and communication, aided and abetted by new technologies? After all, writing was once a new technology, as was the printing press, two enduring technologies that have allowed me to write books, another once-new technology.

The moral is that the brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message, even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information, a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke.Are there, then, certain strategies of language -- a grammar of intent -- that can be applied to short forms of communication of the kind now ubiquitous on the Internet and on mobile devices?

I met a university professor who reported that his daughter had sent 13,000 text messages to her friends in a single month. If each message took, say, 15 seconds, the father calculated that the daughter spent at least two hours a day texting (a word my spelling checker does not yet recognize). Sending text messages -- and cell phone use in general is obviously an addictive and compulsive behavior. My wife and I drove past a young man riding a bicycle with no hands. In one hand he was thumbing a text message. In the other he held what looked like a 3- or 4-month-old baby.

In spite of all that sending and receiving of messages, research has demonstrated that young people do not think of these acts as reading or writing at all. It must seem more like telegraphy than a literary act, which only reminds me that some telegraph messages were more important than others, a result of both their content and language. The book "Telegram!" by Linda Rosenkrantz and an article in The New York Times by Sam Roberts contain a sample of some of the most famous and curious:

• Samuel F. B. Morse, founder of the telegraph, sending his first formal message, 1844: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.

• April 15, 1912: SOS SOS CQD CQD TITANIC. WE ARE SINKING FAST. PASSENGERS ARE BEING PUT INTO BOATS. TITANIC.

• Mark Twain from London in 1897: THE REPORTS OF MY DEATH ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED.

• Edward Teller on the first H-bomb detonation: IT'S A BOY.

• Reporter to a famous actor, inquiring about his age: HOW OLD CARY GRANT?

• Famous actor to reporter: OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?

• And perhaps the most economical exchange of messages in history, between author and publisher about sales of a new novel. Author: ? Publisher: !

• The longest of these telegrams, the one from the Titanic, is about 80 characters, proving that by some standards a Twitter message might be considered downright windy or discursive.

In my own early experiments with Twitter, I've published a haiku: "Captured on the shore/ a chorus line of horseshoe crabs/ unlucky in love." Another original poem: "The kid's bike/ a Schwinn, a beauty/ waits in the rain/ kickstand sturdy/ reflectors ready/ for light that never comes." And perhaps the most famous short poem in the history of American literature, by William Carlos Williams: "So much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with/ rain water/ beside the white/ chickens." All easily fit within the 140-character limit.

The moral is that the brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message, even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information, a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke. These forms need not be word dumps, any more than the short forms that preceded them by decades and centuries.

I asked my "followers" on Twitter to nominate the writers who consistently wrote the most creative and compelling tweets. Among the most interesting included a Manhattan writer, "formerlyCwalken," who looks and sounds a lot like actor Christopher Walken, but whose best messages include short bits about neighbors:

• There's a dead squirrel in the driveway. Mrs. Liebowitz is worried that the death might be gang-related. She's checking FOX News to be sure.

• I am now invited to a dog wedding. I don't have the words to make that stupider than it already sounds. They're registered at Whiskers.

• A neighborhood kid shows up from time to time dressed as Superman. I think it's him anyway. Very difficult to say for sure without the glasses.

Jason Pontin offers personal news from Cambridge, Mass., as well as the occasional mini-editorial:

• A society can be judged by a) how it treats its homosexuals and Jews; b) how many people it incarcerates; 3) how many people it kills.

• Overheard between two goateed geeks near Genzyme: "Timetables are lies we tell our managers to make them feel better."

Most provocative were the cryptic, poetic, postcard-style messages from Dawn Danby of San Francisco, who tweets as "altissima":

• claimed: fog-belt community garden plot in a former sand dune. Semi feral. Neglected chard flowering into giant squid. Embryonic onions.

• untangling nina simone progressions, voice raspy after a late campfire night in Sonoma. Passing ships play chords into the bay.

• On the ferry a Korean economist plies me with pop mp3s of his favourite songs. Hands me an earbud, sings along to Queen.

What stands out for me in these examples is the variety of voice, rhetoric, even genre, everything from reports, to anecdotes, to narratives, to descriptions, to editorials. The voice of each writer stands out as authentic and distinctive, directed to a specific audience of followers, defined as a miniature discourse community (in some cases, more like a discourse platoon or posse). Some write in complete sentences. Some in creative fragments.

No doubt, there is infinite room for formal language in the polluted ocean that is the Internet (formerly known as the Information Superhighway). For example, I just downloaded an application that allows me to store the texts for every Shakespeare play on my iPhone. Before I die, I'll probably have the Library of Congress at my fingertips. But that is not what online communication is famous for. The fame comes from its acronymic, telegraphic (sometimes telepathic), and emoticonic informality. What too many online writers fail to realize is that there are formal requirements for the most effective, most economical informal style.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on September 04, 2009 (boomark / email).