From Telegraph to Twitter: The Language of the Short Form

I guess you could say that I’m a late adopter. I have no Facebook account. I remain skeptical of PowerPoint presentations. My favorite technology is still the book, although my new iPhone is catching up fast. I admit it: I still write the occasional essay in longhand.

But something nifty (an old school word) happened a few months ago when my friends at Poynter Online uploaded the podcasts for my book "Writing Tools" on iTunes U. Before you know it, those little audio essays were number 1 with a bullet, with close to a million downloads. O, Brave New World …

Now filled with confidence — and with the help of my much younger Poynter colleagues — I set off on my first Twitter experience. It did not take long to learn the basics, and I now have about 170 "followers" (I prefer "acolytes") and a couple dozen tweets under my feathers.

My primary motivation was not to grow an audience or to keep up with the latest, but to pursue my interest in short forms of writing.

Read more of this interesting article