Whether you are a writer by profession or not, one thing is true. We are all authors now. Every time we get on Facebook or LinkedIn or Google+ or Twitter, we are publishing something.

You might have heard the rumor that Twitter is dumbing us down, making us like teenagers who text on their cell phones. But good writers know how to have the same impact on their readers, with fewer words.

And isn’t that the same thing we need to do on social media, where our audience is attention disordered, distracted and click-happy?

It can be much harder to get our message out in less space. After all, Mark Twain once said, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” Using fewer words takes practice and, yes, sometimes more time.

Writing teachers, from second grade classrooms to graduate schools, know this. They use an exercise with their students: the six-word story. Can’t tell a story in six words, you say? Well, I bet you can. Ernest Hemingway wrote one:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Every word here is needed to tell the story, but there is not one extra. And we have a story. Now that is good writing. We may never be Hemingways, but we can learn something from him. I have blogged before about lessons from authors, like what Dr. Seuss can teach us about making every word count.

But did you ever think that Twitter might be a great place to practice lean, elegant writing?

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