Twitter has helped me learn conciseness. Earlier today, I had a thought that I wanted to write down. It started as just a one-sentence thought, but then quickly spiraled (in my head) to become paragraph after paragraph of elaboration. I caught myself, thinking, “I only have 140 characters (the length limit for Twitter messages) to get across this message. Fix the sentence to make it communicate what you want; don’t just elaborate forever.”
Obviously, the fullness of each of my thoughts can’t be explored in 140 characters. But no matter how long I make this post (before I edited it, it was almost four times longer), its summary will always be simply the post’s first sentence (which is far less than 140 characters): “Twitter has helped me learn conciseness.”
Edit: I chose to change to the word conciseness. I prefer concision, personally, but conciseness is a better communicator–there’s much less of a pause between reading the word and understanding it, as conciseness has only one meaning and concision has multiple.