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| Social Media Week 2012 SP (Photo: Fora do Eixo) |
In the early days of this blog, an old friend and fellow blogger asked me whether I thought social media had implications for the way we write.
My first thought was that it must; my second was that I had no idea what those implications might be.
At a broad level, it seems clear to me that social media is beneficial for us as writers. When we write on social media, our natural ability to express ourselves may remind us that writing per se isn't always the problem.
Formal academic writing for an audience that seems both inscrutable and implacable can easily undermine our confidence.
An opportunity to write more freely - with less anxiety about audience - can be a great reminder of our own writing ability. This reminder alone won't solve our academic writing problems, but it can help us pinpoint what they are.
Similarly, blogging allows us to find smaller topics and articulate what we want to say about them in a compact format.
This blog, for instance, has accumulated somewhere in the range of 100,000 words thus far; if I'd had to figure out in advance how all those words fit together, you'd never have read any of them (Pat Thomson had a great post recently about the value of the exploratory character of social media).
But is there also a relationship between social media and the act of composition at the sentence level?
Using social media often means learning to use language in a somewhat different way: our register is different; our vocabulary is different; our grammar may even be different.
We embrace certain forms of informality (because Twitter). We develop a store of short words - 'apt' is particularly handy when space is tight - and a greater appreciation of strong verbs. We treat grammar in ways that we daren't in our academic writing; that is, we assume a sympathetic audience who will know what we mean even when we bend the rules.
Even though we don't turn around and write these terse but friendly sentences in our academic writing, the process of writing on social media can give us great insight into the boundaries of a strong sentence.
Even in the more spacious confines of a blog, our style may be affected by the fact that a blog post is written in a compressed time frame. Blogging works best for me when I put some pressure on myself to compose reader-ready sentences. I still experiment and tinker way too much, but I try not to make a big compositional mess that I then have to clean up.
As I've said countless times, allowing ourselves the space to think through writing is an essential aspect of constructing complex academic prose; for me, the mess is an essential part of the academic writing process.
Writing for immediate consumption, however, requires a more disciplined approach to writing. As I thought over the implications of writing for social media, I came up with three ways that social media writing can inform our development as writers.
CONCISION
The first thing that will come to anyone's mind when we think of writing on social media is brevity. Trying to say something in less than 140 characters, for instance, requires that we bring a whole new level of attention to concision. Even if we don't always use those strategies in our everyday writing, we are forced to notice the potency of concision.
If you regularly write extremely short sentences, you are inevitably honing your brevity skills. In doing so, you are bound to experience some of the benefits of limitation. Sometimes we will encounter the limits of limitation - i.e., the point at which something can't be any shorter - but we will also learn the value of expressing ourselves in fewer words than we thought possible.
TONE
One of the best ways to understand the role of tone in writing is by having to shift that tone. Academic prose isn't necessarily good or bad writing, but it is very particular in its tone. Social media writing, on the other hand, can give us a sense of a different style of writing and thereby help us see the distinct contours of a piece of academic writing.
The benefits of this sort of relativism vis-à-vis writing seem evident to me. While people worry that the unique demands of Twitter or the text message will undermine writing ability, it seems entirely possible that the experience of writing in multiple registers will actually strengthen writing overall.
Greater awareness of the conventionality of writing will increase the chance that we will be able to find ways to work productively within those conventions.
NUANCE
Short-form writing is also a great reminder of the importance of doing justice to ambiguity. For instance, I find that Twitter is great for sharing things that I like, but not so good for those things about which I have significant reservations. Without room for caveats, we are left without an easy way to disagree respectfully.
Think about your average statement of scholarly reservation: "While I found the decision to highlight X extremely helpful, I was ultimately troubled by the reliance upon traditional categories of Y." That's 145 characters, even without actual content. So I don't share that link; Twitter becomes for me a place to talk about the things I actively like or that I like enough to forego qualification.
The limits of social media writing thus confirm one of the great strengths of academic writing: the creation of a space expansive enough to contain both agreement and disagreement (this helpful Twitter chat on the relationship between academic writing and social media also touches on this theme).
Overall, composing text for social media is instructive for our non-social media writing. By writing things that are more direct or casual or polemical, we are better able to understand how those qualities may or may not operate within our formal academic prose.
And, ultimately, being able to shift registers and understand how tone, evidence, vocabulary, and syntax all affect that shift can only improve our academic writing.
So those are my current thoughts about writing for social media. What did I miss? What has your experience been? Has social media changed the way you write or altered your awareness of writing style?
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