140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form [Paperback]

Dom Sagolla, one of the inventors and active promoters of Twitter, offers commentary on "the short form"--tweets and other tweet-sized snippets of text that have become the new way to communicate. Hoping to improve my Facebook status messaging skills, and impressed by Dom's web cred, I downloaded the Kindle version within a day of discovering this book's existence.

The major sections promise to show us how to LEAD, VALUE, MASTER, EVOLVE, and ACCELERATE. The three-layer table of contents supports the book's claim to be a style guide. The depth stops there. By the time the author revealed that he had prepared to write the book by sending brief ideas that occurred to him off to a special Twitter account for later assembly, I was not surprised. Giving lie to the structured outline, the book itself has a snippety, disjointed feel to it. This style works for tweets, but not for a full-length book that ought to contain smooth transitions and thoughtful integration.

There are some useful take-aways. The book begins with an informative history of Twitter's inception and evolution. Some good thinking went into the 12-stage "cycle of focus and distraction" experienced by Twitter users. There are inclusive lists of various language and text techniques. The book does stress basic writing concepts like simplicity, conciseness and attention to your audience. It warns against lying, rudeness, and naiveté. And it admonishes us with PC sincerity to never, ever post drunk.

Beyond its choppy presentation, how does it disappoint? By falling short. The author has much to say about style and developing one's voice. But the highest form of style it advocates is offering up a stream of glib one-liners and attracting followers who enjoy them. There is little on style in service of some more substantive message, be it personal, political, commercial or social. Such an expansion of focus would bring depth and utility that the book currently lacks. Too much of the material is standard writing advice, better presented elsewhere and only slightly adapted to the short form.

And, I am sorry to say it, the author's examples just aren't that clever. Yes, there are some good one-liners. But how do you write short form messages that entertain and invite engagement and response? During the time I spent reading this book, I learned more from the status messages of a few Facebook friends than I took away from the book's extensive collection of tweets past. I believe the author's understandable enthusiasm for the Twitter archive may have influenced his authorial judgment.

I recommend a quick look through this book at the library to satisfy your curiosity--and perhaps discover that you disagree with me. Then spend more time with something that will really improve your writing, like Susan Bell's The Artful Edit or Marc Kramer and Wendy Call's Telling True Stories. Neither focuses on the short form of writing. But you can use their insights to adapt to it on your own. In this book, the author advises us to "[t]hink of every tweet as an epitaph." Well said. Let this collection of tweets rest in peace.