"Effective tweeting requires effective writing. The short form—each tweet is 140 characters or less—requires discipline. Tweets reward clarity, wit and concision. You could train yourself to be a better writer by using twitter effectively. It hones your focus on the sentence level, and the sentence is the most important unit of composition.

Once, I asked a group of students to take an essay they had written for class and tweet it, sentence by sentence. By forcing them to fit each sentence into that white box, I was asking them to analyze every word they used and to consider how they constructed the clauses in the sentence. They were furious with me: they hated the exercise. But they all agreed they thought about their sentences more than they had when they first wrote the paper…

I have broken down effective tweets into four categories: headline, questions, self-contained quips and comments…"

"Twitter is an associative writing form, not a narrative one. In Twitter, we are sent somewhere else-via a link-or reminded of something. We are not telling stories. Thus, while the twitter fiction is swell and cute, it usually it misses the generic boat. Twitter promises a new slate for poets. For fiction writers, not so much. (For what I find to be a notable exception, see my piece for Economist.com). Tweets create meaning and aesthetic experiences  by reminding us, not by telling a story…

1.a.) Twitter does not operate on the narrative arc of rising action, suspense, climax, and denouement…

Twitter lacks single-point perspective (or omniscience)…

2.) Twitter helps resist the curse of paragraphism…

2.a.) A new focus on the sentence is salutary…

Conclusion: There is no summing up on twitter. There are many arrows pointing one across (not up or down) to the ideas of others, cross-fertilization, and forced attention to the composition of sentences."

"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important."<br />
—Gary Provost 

"A Primer for Kicking Ass

"I compiled stats for 3-4 books for each author, except Gladwell who has written two, and then plotted them on a scatter chart, with the y axis representing % complex words and the x axis representing words per sentence. The results were pretty fascinatin