The art of shortform — can you tell a story in 140 characters or less?
In it’s earliest incarnation, Twitter was a social media platform designed to tell your friends what you’re up to without having to get in touch with them directly. The idea was that you would send a text to one number, and that number would broadcast that text to all of your friends. The texting aspect is now long gone, leaving behind only the character limit.
Twitter seems to have surpassed it’s original purpose these days — it’s now used for everything from live blogging breaking news to provoking world leaders and trying to incite a nuclear war. It’s become an indispensable tool for journalists, challenging us to really focus on structure and present only the most crucial parts of a story. To demonstrate this, I’ve found tweets from two different sources surrounding the same story, and will analyse the structural and narrative decisions made, and how they lend themselves to shortform text.
The tweets analysed in this article will revolve around the actress Rose McGowan having her Twitter account suspended following a series of tweets about sexual harassment in Hollywood.
This first tweet by Buzzfeed News makes use of an attachment to provide extra information outside of the tweet itself. A photo of the main character alongside a relevant quote allows for more criteria from Cortazzi’s table of narrative structure (1993) to be conveyed to the reader without them having to follow the link provided.
The tweet itself informs the reader of the abstract of the story, a summary of what you can expect to read about in the main article. A photo of the actress supports the orientation element of this structure by providing information on the ‘Who?’. Readers may not recognise the name Rose McGowan, but as she is an actress they may recognise her face and therefore become more invested in the story. ‘Where?’ is explained in the tweet to be Twitter itself, and ‘What?’ is the suspension of her account. No tangible time is given for when the suspension of her account occurred but the tweet does specify that it happened “after she spoke out about the treatment of women”, which does perhaps provide more context for the reader than simply reporting it happened ‘Wednesday night’, for example.
As the tweet is reporting on what a character has said, it also makes use of an effaced narrator.
The second tweet comes from relatively unknown U.S news site Think Progress. The reason I have chosen this tweet is that it is an example of the Intro and Twist structure that works well in short form text. The first sentence explains the crux of the story, introducing two of the main characters in the story. The second sentence provides the ‘twist’, an unexpected turn that makes the reader want to read more about the story. Whereas Buzzfeed News summed up the story in to a concise sentence that provided the information crucial to the story, Think Progress deliberately holds back some of the information by not clearly explaining how McGowan’s tweet and her being locked out of Twitter are linked. This makes use of the ‘curiosity gap’ — making readers follow a link to satisfy their curiosity
This tweet also explicitly names Rose McGowan and Harvey Weinstein, which not only links back to Cortazzi’s ideas on narrative but also shows the writer considered something that perhaps the writer of the Buzzfeed News tweet did not. By including the full names of both figures, it could increase the potential audience of the tweet — this will appear in the results for anyone searching ‘Rose McGowan’ and ‘Harvey Weinstein’, whereas the tweet from Buzzfeed News will only appear for those searching for information about McGowan, despite both tweets being about the same story.
As this story is a follow up to the larger story of the accusations against Harvey Weinstein, it makes sense to make the tweet available to those following the original story.
To conclude, Twitter is not only a useful tool in terms of storytelling, but also acts as bait for hooking in readers to a much larger story. Structuring a tweet is different, and arguably more difficult, than structuring a long form text, as you only have 140 characters to convince the reader that they need to know the information you have to offer.
