Articles in the age of Twitter

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“IF YOU don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; but if you read it, you are misinformed” — American writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain (1835 — 1910).

In this era of Twitter and other social media platforms, many give little interest to articles in newspapers. This is because social media platforms take up huge margin of people’s interests, especially since news are published on these platforms within a second if not a minute. After few minutes of its emergence, it is followed by scores of analysis and comments over a single piece of news and even live photos from the incident. No doubt, this represents a huge development.

Sometimes, instead of writing an article of more than 400 words, you only need 140 words (number of characters in Twitter). At times, such “tweet” provides enough information that would render readers not to refer to a newspaper article in this regard. Such a development falls under the concept of “Using least number of words with the most clarity is the best form of expression”.

Columnists cover many events and each of these events need a comment of not more than a sentence that contains description and high-sense analysis. This is usually sufficient enough if articulated properly, even though concise words might fail to convey the experience of an event as a whole, and the writer of concise analysis or even report needs to master the tools of writing.

Without proper tools of writing, a columnist will face difficulties in writing articles that can convey the idea in a reasonable manner.

Because of this, many have read or listened to a poem that consists more than twenty verses; however, only one verse or a stanza from it becomes famous. That is the undisputed reality.

The quote at the beginning of this article focuses on the so-called “press credibility”. I believe such credibility applies also on the social media platforms including Twitter.

The principles that today apply on press and journalism also apply on many Twitter users who are involved in politics, human intellectual and academics. Credibility is the most important aspect of all aspects, most of all when it comes to writing either for a newspaper or on Twitter.

Nonetheless, it is important for readers to distinguish between a credible writer and a fake one in any given writing aspect. This is due to the fact that writing represents depicting with words what is in people’s minds for the readers.

twitter@alzmi1969

By Yousef Awadh Al-Azmi

This news has been read 15242 times!