Mike McInally

In Thursday’s Gazette-Times, we’ll run most of the responses to our “Goodbye 2009 Twitter Challenge,” in which we invited participants to summarize their year as if they were writing a holiday letter — but to do it in Twitter style, 140 characters or less.

I struggled to edit my year down to 140 characters — and I imagine most people had similar struggles. (You must have had a bad year indeed if you couldn’t fill out 140 characters with details from the year.)

Click here to see my Tweet from 2009 and those of some of the other participants. It’s not too late to add your own holiday Tweet.

But the exercise got me thinking about how, in this way at least, the format of Twitter is similar to that of poetry, in which the goal is to boil down big ideas into a minimum of words — or, to be more precise, the words that are exactly correct.

(Click here, by the way, for one of my most favorite recent poems, written by a New York poet named Carl Dennis.)

That idea of conveying a lot of information in the fewest words possible also is one of the tenets of journalism. I sometimes advise younger journalists to study poetry to explore the ways in which skillful poets boil down big ideas to a minimum of words. (I’d give the same advice to older journalists, but everyone knows you can’t tell older journalists anything.)

This is not to say, of course, that all Twitter is poetry. Nor would I ever claim that all journalism — or, for that matter, much of journalism — rises to the level of poetry.

But it does serve as a reminder that words matter. And words that are precisely and exactly chosen matter even more.

It is a skill and discipline that will continue to be valuable even as journalism explores its multimedia future. I tell that to younger journalists as well. (Older journalists are too busy trying to figure out this newfangled Internet thing.)

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