Last week, the Finnish conductor and music teacher Atso Almila suggested that Twitter’s 140-character limit is fine if you leave out redundancies. Twitter poses a challenge for Finnish, where ordinary words can be quite lengthy, but concentrating on wording and grammar can pay off in English tweets as well.
To save just a few characters:
- Omit extra spaces: race track > racetrack.
- Leave out commas and quote marks: red green & blue; we saw Wonder Woman yesterday.
- Use shorter forms of words: initialize > start.
- Use a colon for and or is: The campaign launch is Tuesday > Tuesday: campaign launch.
When you need to trim a few more letters:
- Use numbers instead of words: the 12 chapters.
- Cut words that don’t alter the main idea, like auxiliary verbs and relative pronouns: the point that I had made > the point I made.
- Avoid intensifiers: (very) severe, (really) tardy.
- Use common or obvious abbreviations: September 19 > Sept 19.
- Use hashtags judiciously. Will #anyone #search for the #terms you’re #including?
- Embed the hashtag in context: Who’s at the XYZ conference? #Helsinki > Who’s at the XYZ #Helsinki conference?
Got other suggestions? Share them. And you may have noticed, many of these are good ideas for all kinds of writing, not just the concentrated communication of Twitter.