Twitter Helps Writing Skills

Journalistic writing is simplistic and concise.

Essay writing requires one to be descriptive, critical and most of all analytical.

Ever since I started writing for The Daily Tar Heel, I have tried to develop the ability to write in a manner that somewhat follows the AP Stylebook.

The AP format requires journalists to abbreviate months and states and to use 'that' and 'which' as sparingly as possible, and if you do use them, they must be used in a specific way so that no misinterpretation can occur.

When I write an essay for one of my English classes, I usually refer to William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. Without going in to too much detail and possibly making you – the reader – bored, I will try to explain some of the major requests by the book.


Placing commas in the correct position is one of the key points in the book. Knowing when and where to use commas is essential for anyone wanting to write an essay.

The use of conjunctions is another difference.

When writing an article, I find myself only using ‘and,’ ‘or’ and ‘but;’ however, I tend to use more formal conjunctions when writing essays. For example, I would use ‘however,’ ‘moreover’ and ‘nevertheless.’

These differences are finicky, but they make the text – what you are writing – sound and mean different things. Working in the journalism field has helped me think of and write better ledes for my stories.

Follow me @akcranford

The lede of an article is the first sentence of the article, and it is meant to pique the interest of readers. It is supposed to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye and enthralling to the mind.

Blogging has allowed me to develop my writing abilities, but I have trouble in thinking of ways to improve my journalistic writing. I thought blogging would do that, but when I first started to write, I did not know how to write good or even half-decent ledes. And I did not necessarily know how to write captivating material.

For the longest time, I thought a lede was somewhat similar to an essay’s thesis. The lede is supposed to make the reader become mesmerized and make the reader linger. The thesis basically explains what the paper will encompass.

The two are different, though. While a lede may explain what the article will be about, it can sometimes simply be a play on words or an inside joke.

I started blogging because I wanted to develop my writing skills as a journalist, but I did not write any mesmerizing ledes, and until I learned how to do that, I would not be able to improve.

Most people will only read the first couple of sentences or the first couple of paragraphs in an article, and the rest of the article will most likely go unread.  So I thought of ways to effectively improve my journalistic writing.

If you – as the reader – made it this far into my post, I want to personally congratulate you. You get to read my plan for improving and developing lede writing skills.

The answer: Twitter.

Because Twitter only allows users to post in 140 characters or less, users have to carefully choose what they are going to say in order to entice reactions from their friends and peers.

Here is an example:

The #SuperBowl proved it last night, defense wins championships. @chelseafc 1:0 @MCFC.
— KICKTV (@KICKTV) February 3, 2014

This Twitter account uses a recent and popular event – The Super Bowl – in the US to make people read the whole post. The post is about a soccer game that occurred in England, but by making a connection to the most popular American sport, more people can feel connected to the tweet. The post is short, concise and it makes readers feel connected to multiple sports and world events.

Writing a lede is very similar to posting a tweet, so I made a Twitter, and I hopefully can use it to develop my writing even further. I believe I am a pretty good reader, writer and conversationalist, but I consider myself a novice when it comes to writing in a journalistic manner.