Comments on: Snarky for a Sunday Afternoon & a Yo, Lincoln! Twitter Address

By: Roberta Rosenberg

Roberta Rosenberg — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:58:28 +0000

@James - I find the majority of college kids can’t write a simple, concise sentence since they’re trained to bloviate in academia. The first piece of real-world copywriting advice I received was to change “Enclosed please find …” to “Here is …” in a business letter I was writing.

It was a complete revelation!

By: James

James — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:53:23 +0000

@roberta - Concise is a better word than short but I find the youngsters just out of college have a tough time understanding the difference. Keep in mind I’m working with young account executives not copy writers. If I can get them to write short and still make sense they are well on their way to concise.

By: Roberta Rosenberg

Roberta Rosenberg — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:29:11 +0000

@James - I agree, and tell my own copywriting students, that writing tightly and concisely is a whole lot harder than blathering all over the page. But I wouldn’t go so far to say short and concise are equivalent. The GA, as noted, is spare and concise and not a word is wasted. The Twitter version is short but without the power and poignancy. Thanks for your input!

By: James

James — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:58:49 +0000

It seems to me that Twitter has one advantage today. It helps people learn how to write short.

Writing short is hard. Most don’t do it well. Twitter’s character limit forces you to practice, which leads to improvement and then success.

It usually takes me 1 to 2 years of beatings about the head to get recent college grads to understand that a POV or recommendation on one page is much more powerful than the same on ten pages.