Twitter’s 140 Characters to Teach Tight Writing
Posted by Marsha on April 27, 2011
Teaching students to write tight is difficult. We want them to elaborate, but we don’t want unnecessarily long sentences with strings of empty adjectives and adverbs, vague nouns and wimpy verbs. We want the detail via vivid word choices! Less active sentences, to be verbs and articles, more concise vocabulary. We want them to get to the point. Eloquently and with exacto-knife like precision.
One way to make this idea interesting and fun is to use Twitter’s 140-character limit with your students. It is easy. First, give students a question to comment on; one they will have a strong opinion about and of which they will have a lot to say. Let them talk about it with a peer, hash out the goods, and then free write or draft a response. Next, give them a blank, pseudo Twitter feed with 140 blank character lines like this: (download for free worksheets tab )
Have them rewrite their response as a 140-character tweet. Let them agonize over how they must revise their writing, choose more precise words, and reorganize their sentences. Let them use symbols and shorthand, or not. That is up to you. The result is the same. This exercise forces students to extraneous verbiage and write tight!
Keep the tweets for a bulletin board. Let the students read what their peers are thinking and even tweet a response back. Pose content related questions and have them “tweet” their answers this way. Get creative. Have fun. Motivate your students to learn something they really need to know… how to communicate effectively. Say [write] what you mean, mean what you say [write].
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