To the new people, welcome to my short course on writing for Twitter. To the veterans of the list, you already know I'm about to drop fire. I'm excited to do this quick writing course for Twitter ahead of the release of my new course on growing, writing, and selling on the platform.
This is the first of 3 or 4 blogs I will post giving you quick tips for improving your tweeting. Honestly, these lessons are great for writing on any medium, but Twitter is where I learned how to write more engagingly.
I love Twitter because it rewards good writing.
I don't claim to be expert. I'm only an Amazon best-selling writer (For those of you who don't know, it's remarkably easy to game the system to earn that honor. I didn't, but it can be done.).
But I have learned a thing or two that will help you write more "readable" blog posts (Great for SEO ranking), more engaging tweets (Engaging tweets help you spread your message), and be all-around more enchanting with your writing.
But enough talking up this free course. Let's hop right into it.
What Is Word Fatigue?
An editor of my book "Level Up Mentality" introduced me to this idea. When I typed the phrase into Google, the only thing I got were definitions of the word "fatigue". This tells me that even if the concept is known by another name, this phrase is relatively unique.
Word fatigue is when the same word is used in a sentence or phrase more than once with the exact same implicit or explicit meaning. For example, consider the following as a tweet:
If you waste a year, you really waste two years. One year for what you should have done then, and one year to what you're missing now that you're doing it.
Since I'd never put anyone's account on blast for bad writing, I took one of my more popular tweets from the past 30 days and intentionally bastardized it.
While the idea I express in this tweet is sound, it would never take off in its current version (Go ahead and test it if you don't believe me). The reason is that your eyes and brain get fatigued reading the word "year" repeatedly.
It also got tired of reading the word "waste". There was was no reason to use it twice, for it was used exactly the same way. A synonym would have been way better and you wouldn't have felt like you had to be forced to read on through my repetition.
I don't claim to understand exactly how the brain works and why certain types of language is more pleasing to it than others. I do, however, claim to be aware that the brain seeks novelty and I use that to my advantage. I might write that as a rough, but I'd never tweet it out as is. I'd need to use pronouns or implication Some synonyms might be nice as well. This is what I actually tweeted out:
Why This Worked Better
I only use the word "year" once. That's all I need to do, because the audience knows that I'm not talking about any other noun. This allows me to create a sharper looking tweet that better resonates with the audience. They don't need to be reminded that I'm talking about years. If I repeated the word year each time, it would seriously break up engagement and reading flow.
People might agree with what I'm saying, but they won't have that knee jerk reaction to share my tweet. If they're reading an article that is redundant in its nouns, they will almost certainly get bored and this GREATLY decreases the likelihood of them reading to the end or sharing. Word fatigue literally tires the reader out.
If you can't feel the difference that avoiding word fatigue makes, I'll give you another example.
I use this example to show you show how I carefully avoided word fatigue in some of the more unsuspecting places that it lurks. A crafty way to avoid noun repetition is by use of synonyms and alternative phrasing.
In the first two sentences, "not unique" = "aren't so different no one understands". I could have lazily used the word "unique" twice, but that would have instantly triggered a case of word fatigue for the reader.
In the last two sentences, you see me avoid a similar trap. "Just as bad and made it" ≈ "even worse and flourished". This trap is a little more inconspicuous, but I avoid it by the usage of stylistic parallelism (Don't worry if that last sentence brought back nightmares of high school English. I'll explain more in another lesson. Or you can google if you're impatient).
In the last sentence, I could have just as easily said "someone's had it even worse and made it". Once again, this lazy. It doesn't force me to come up with a different synonymous way to say what I've already said. The reader would suffer fatigue, get bored, and lose all interest in further enjoyment or sharing of my work.
Why Not Just Avoid Word Fatigue By Writing Less?
In the two examples, it might seem justified to just cut my ideas off at the first go around. You might be asking yourself why you can't just keep your tweets or writing short and sweet, without rephrasing the same thing in different ways. The simple answer to that is "engagement".
Your success as a writer (regardless of the medium) depends on your ability to keep people hooked on your words. The more time they spend engaged with your content, the more likely they are to come back for more. It's not a coincidence that I titled my first book on writing for Steemit "Level Up Mentality" Good writing is like a drug.
Since good writing is rewarded by engagement, it pays to write longer prose. Why would you only write 140 characters worth of tweets when you have 280 to work with? Google's SEO algorithm strongly rewards the time a reader spends on the page ingesting content. Computers and humans alike enjoy longer content. The problem is that the longer the content is, the greater risk you run of being redundant and causing your audience to suffer word fatigue.
Quick Solutions To Word Fatigue
To keep this short lesson short, let me summarize.
If there's only one subject, use the noun for it once. Then use pronouns or leave people to use context clues.
The thesaurus is your friend. Find synonyms to express the same idea more than once.
Find different ways to express the same idea to make your point. Repetition drives the main idea home, but only when you avoid fatigue.
Longer content is more engaging, but only if you avoid fatigue.
If you follow these short tips, you'll greatly improve your writing in everything from Twitter to long form content.
If you enjoyed this lesson, the next one is tomorrow night. My full length course on writing, growing, and selling on Twitter drops next week. Make sure you're on the look out. In the meantime, enjoy these dope lessons. Tomorrow night, I'll give you a short lesson on putting personality into your tweets to make for a great way to stand out and get ahead.