I love Twitter, but I also tend to be rather verbose. This is problematic. My solution to this is a method I call tweet crafting (as in crafting the tweet). Let’s walk through the most recent example, shall we?
I took a walk through the parking lot at work, today, to wake myself up a bit and to give myself a bit of a break. While walking, I noticed a car parked taking up two spots. Presumably, this is because they don’t want someone to damage their “nice” car. Who cares? It’s a car, get over it. It bugged me, but I got over it until I walked around the corner and saw another car parked in the same manner. Seriously, people, knock it off.
It was at this time that I decided to share my thoughts with the world, so I went to my phone and typed out the following:
Whenever I see a car parked using two spots (instead of the usually-allocated one spot per car) I am overwhelemed with the urge to key the car. But I don’t. Does this make me a bad person? For not keying their car, I mean.
For those counting at home, you’ll notice that that is about 85 characters more than you’re allowed to post on Twitter. The problem is further compounded by the fact that I wanted to cross-post this tweet to Facebook, so that everyone can bask in my hilarious wit and insight, and I do that by adding the hashtag #fb to the end of the tweet, further limiting me to 137 characters instead of the usual 140. Now what?
I sat down and started to edit my tweet – to push, gently, at the corners in an effort to mold it to the harsh limitations of 140 characters while still retaining all the necessary components to be interesting and funny (to me, anyway). The original insight breaks down into three crucial pieces.
The Setup
This is the part where I explain the situation I find myself in (jerks who can’t be bothered to park in one spot). That’s this part: Whenever I see a car parked using two spots (instead of the usually-allocated one spot per car) I am overwhelemed with the urge to key the car. But I don’t. If you count the letters that is already longer than 140 characters. So, we have to trim it down. The first thing I did was reduce the two spaces after each period to only one. This hurts me, inside, but I do it anyway. Next, I remove the parenthetical – I assume my audience is intelligent, so they can understand my meaning without spelling out for them. Then, I substitute longer words for shorter, “Whenever” becomes “When”, for example. I also merged the two sentences into one. Finally, I take out a few words here and there (e.g. “I see”) to shorten it further, still retaining the meaning – the end result being: When a car is parked in two spots at once I alway want to key the car, but I don’t. Now to tackle the other two sections.
The Commentary
This is the easiest section, honestly. I’m just musing here. Really it’s the false end to the tweet that makes people think it’s why I’m really posting so I can surprise them with the actual punchline, later. The commentary, in this tweet, is: Does this make me a bad person? Not too long, to start with, but applying the same rules as above it becomes Am I a bad person? Finally, the last section….
The Payoff
This is, of course, the actual reason for the tweet. Who cares about people parked across two spots or if I’m a bad person? The real point is making the reader think I’m upset about my desire to key the car when, in fact, it is the opposite. Here’s our payoff: For not keying their car, I mean. I retained this as much as possible, only changing “For” into “By” (a one character difference, but it helped).
Here is the actual tweet.
Of course, what I should really do is print out one of my favorite xkcd comics and stick it on their windshield. But how do you do alt-text in real life?