I used to tweet for a software company which would send me news about, for example, how a space station was using their software. There’d be lots of fascinating details, which I would then squish into 140 characters. It took a while to distill everything down in that way, but it made for rather exciting tweets.
Usually, you have more leeway than that.
However, if you approach your writing with that idea in mind — the idea that you have to squish as much meaning as possible into as few characters as possible — your writing will be a lot better.
It’s startling how many websites include sentences like, “Everyone knows that there are many reasons to worry about home security.”
First, if everyone knows it, don’t say it. If it isn’t the case that everyone knows it, don’t say that everyone knows it.
Second, announcing that there are many reasons for something is pointless. Jump right in with the reasons.
Pretend you only have 140 characters. Pretend you get fined for every unnecessary word. Or just go back over what you’ve written and remove any sentence that can be removed without changing the effect of the page you’re writing. You may be amazed at the improvement.
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