I had great hopes for Twitter: Limiting the number of characters a writer could use would force people to think–and to get their thoughts clear– before they wrote.  If you are going to say something worth saying in 144 characters (or even 288) you had better be clear and concise.

Throughout my school years, and well into college, I found it very difficult to get my thoughts down on paper.  The person who helped me break through my struggles to write was a professor of education, Dr. Trautner.  He demanded that his students write well.  He challenged me personally with his belief that there is an indissoluble connection between good writing and good thinking.  I tested out that assertion during two classes in the philosophy of education and discovered that he was right.  My efforts to write clearly led to better thinking.

I worked very hard in those classes to try to show the professor that I could think well.  To do that I wrote and edited and rewrote and wrote some more … until I felt somewhat comfortable that my thinking was clear.  And then I discovered that my finished essays were always shorter than my originals, sometimes less than half as long.

When President Woodrow Wilson was congratulated on the brevity of a speech and asked how much time he spent preparing his speeches he replied:

“It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

Woodrow Wilson

Taking the time to clarify your thoughts and your writing and your speaking generally results in shorter essays and speeches.  

As a preacher, I had to rediscover this.  It happened in a roundabout way.  The sermons from early in my career were too intricate and complicated and convoluted.  What seemed clear when I wrote it and when I read it back to myself was nearly impossible to follow for a person sitting in a pew.  So I decided to preach without a manuscript.  Preaching without manuscript or notes demanded that the flow of the sermon be simple enough for me to remember so that I could retrace it without getting lost.  I ended up spending most of my preparation time thinking and praying myself clear about what I had to say.

In practice, I discovered that I needed more than clarity to make my way from the beginning of a sermon to its end.  Yes, the path needed to be clear so that I didn’t get lost.  But the path also needed to be short enough that I could remember which road to take at each juncture.  So I worked on clarity and on brevity.  And I discovered that my efforts to be brief worked hand in hand with my efforts to be clear. 

That’s when I got confused.  I began to equate brief with concise. And it is this confusion which produced my false hopes for Twitter.

I had come to believe four ideas about the relationship between brevity and writing. The first three of these are generally true:

1. Attempts to be clear lead to concise writing.
2. Attempts to be clear lead to brevity.
3. Attempts to be concise lead to clear writing and better thinking.

But a fourth idea sneaked into my thinking. It was this: Attempts to be brief lead to clear writing and better thinking. As I examine that statement now it is obviously not always true.

Actually, it seems that many of the reasons writers are brief have nothing to do with being either concise or clear. Some people are brief simply to be fast, to jump into the conversation before it moves past them. And some people avoid the hard work of slow thinking by blurting out whatever comes into their mind.

There are many examples on Twitter of concise writing and clear thinking.  But all too often the tweets I read shatter my expectations; and prove that brevity does not necessarily lead to clarity, either of writing or of thought.