Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Tweethis


In Monday's class, Dr Burton asked us all to take our thesis for our chapters, and work it down into a 'tweetable' sentence. I don't know much about Twitter, but I do know a thing or two about texting. One of the most irritating aspects of a text message is the character count. When I write a text I can only have 160 characters, which means it counts each individual letter, space and punctuation, and when it reaches 160 the text breaks into two messages. I hate this! I want to be able to put in apostrophes, commas, periods, spaces and smiley face emoticons without being counted and limited! As soon as my text goes into two messages I go back to the start and begin deleting the commas. If that doesn't bring it down to one messages then I go back and take out all apostrophes, then end punctuation, then I start putting random words into contractions (minus the apostrophe, of course!), and finally I will start deleting spaces between words. It doesn't bother me at all to receive a text that is in two pages, but for some odd reason another weird quirk about me is proper grammar in text messages and two page text messages. So, when asked to make my thesis 'textable' I scowled at Dr Burton. Here are a few of my attempts at texting my thesis:

The Original
The traditional primary text is the physical book that is published and sold in bookstores; however, using non-traditional adaptations of a novel such as film, audio or other versions will create a new experience and understanding of the text that is unique to each form and beneficial to consumers.
Character count: 299 :(

First Attempt
The traditional primary text is the print book thats sold in bookstores however using nontraditional adaptations of a novel such as film audio or other versionsll create an experience and understanding of it thats unique to each form and beneficial to readers.
Character count: 261

Second Attempt
Nontraditional adaptations like film, audio or other versions will create a new experience and understanding of the text that is unique to each form and beneficial to consumers.
Character count: 176

Third Attempt
Film, audio or other versions will create a new experience and understanding of the text that is unique to each form and beneficial to consumers.
Character count: 144!

Whew, third time is the charm, right? I thought about texting my 'twethis' to Dr Burton to make sure that it was textable, but since it is 10:30pm I decided not to test my grade against that! : )

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for going through your process on this. It makes me wonder if a "tweethis" is feasible. Maybe we need to consider a Tweet as something more like the title or else some teaser content, and not the actual thesis statement for your chapter? We'll discuss.

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