For years I refused to incorporate the exclamation mark into my writing, unless it was on a birthday card. For some reason “Happy Birthday!” looks so much better than “Happy Birthday.”
But in the last few months I’ve noticed that the pesky exclamation mark has made its way into my everyday writing. How could this be?
It’s not because I spend time with third grade girls and have become overly excited about mundane issues in life; it’s because of social media. Enter: Twitter
With only 140 characters to express a thought on Twitter, I don’t have the luxury of using power words to emphasize my thoughts. Instead, I’ve come to depend on punctuation and symbols to get my point across.
Here’s an example of a sentence that I would’ve written months ago:
The movie The Hangover made me laugh so hard I forgot to get up for popcorn during my self-imposed intermission. Actually, I forgot the intermission altogether.
Here’s what I would write thanks to Twitter:
The Hangover is hilarious! I didn’t even need popcorn to enjoy the movie:)
Okay, so maybe my example is silly, but you get the point. With Twitter and other social media platforms, we can communicate more conversationally and with fewer, unnecessary words…even if it is the exclamation mark that lets us do that.
How has Twitter changed your everyday writing?
I am in exactly the same boat as you are. I very rarely used to use th exclamation mark but over the last couple of years I seem to be using it more and more. Twitter has certainly had an impact but I think Facebook has too.
Short, sharp messages on Social Networking sites has made an impact on how I communicate with others and probably how others interprete my communications. Understanding how to communicate in a way that means my messages are decoded in the way I encoded them, across a variety of plaforms, is becoming more and more difficult.
With the changes that are currently taking place in communication though, this is a skill we will all need to build moving forward. ‘Practice makes (almost) perfect’ is my approach!
What do you think?
Agreed — practice is key. I never stop learning or improving.
I like that social media has changed the way we write. Now, instead of sounding so formal and “professional” we can speak to each other in a conversational way.
Thanks for stopping by, Robert.
I appreciate the fact that the “!” has resurfaced. As long as it is not overused!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Twitter has helped me work on crafting more succinct messages — tough with a character limit versus a word limit.
Considering having future job applicants tweet their pitch — might be fun to add to the interview process.
I’m sort of a lone wolf pack.
Nice. I like the idea of Tweeting a pitch. Make it clear and make it stand out.