Grammar Rules for Twitter
As communication shrinks down to 140 characters the quality of writing associated with it is also degrading! Even though we live in a world where you are expected to understand “omg wat r u wearing thats soooo ly”, the truth is most people would prefer the English language we were taught in grade school.
I’m pretty lucky to have a Micromedia editor, by the name of Natalie B., that helps to manage ModCloth’s Twitter content. After several months of editing, she was able to formulate the following rules for proper Twitter grammar.
- Always try to follow conventional grammar rules when you have enough characters.
- Paraphrase badly written tweets that you plan to ReTweet! Just because someone else said it doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for it.
- Only use abbreviations that are widely recognized, e.g. w/, hr, 1-9, btw, ha ha and smilies.
- Industry lingo is ok, such as ly (last year) used in the fashion industry, when your audience is in the industry.
- Use ampersands(&) whenever possible, save the characters!
- Slang is OK if it’s appropriate for your audience. For ModCloth we often use “fave” and “<3” because its the language of our customers. But everything should be done in moderation.
- Punctuation is always important. The old rules still work, you only need one exclamation point. Multiple exclamation points, along with ALL CAPS, just look spastic.
Do you have any more Twitter Grammar rules? We’d love to hear them! You can also apply these rules to status updates. :)
