Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

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quinn.anya / CC BY-SA 2.0

My friend's father says that people who use a lot of swear words only do so because they have a limited vocabulary (a comment that has prompted my current attempt to stop swearing).

I feel the same way about abbreviations.

I can't abide an LOL, a j/k, or, especially, a ROFL LMAO when there are so many beautiful words you can use!  I was thrilled by the advent of QWERTY keyboard mobile phones, since it meant I no longer had to slowly type out every word in my stubbornness. And hurrah for the iPhone, which lets me go on and on using words like "abhorrent" and "incubator" (okay, I've never texted the word incubator, but I like knowing that I could).

The same goes for Twitter. Those 140 characters present a challenge to get a message across as succinctly as possible. And it is possible. An entire day can be summed up by saying "The cheeseburger I had for dinner makes up for the fact that I drove into a pond this morning. Sort of." It's compelling, it's amusing, it's thought-provoking.

Compare that to this: I drv my car in2 a pond ths mrning, now have 2 pay 3k 2 fix, total #fail LOL. But hving awesome cheezburger now @TGIFridays w/pickles #ftw
I don't even want to try to read it. It makes my eyes sad.

The point shouldn't be to fit as many words as possible into a tweet by abbreviating them into oblivion. Twitter is an exercise in brevity; an exercise which I, perhaps masochistically, love. Probably because a good portion of my work life has included trying to fit my thoughts into a character count.

Some abbreviations are a necessary part of using the platform. Writing RT is both courteous and necessary, and typing "re-tweet" would take up too many valuable characters. And, in the same way that no one calls E-mail "electronic mail," no one actually types out "re-tweet," so RT doesn't even feel like an abbreviation anymore. And we can't avoid the jumble of shortened URLs which, while practical, are distracting and cryptic to read.

Still, even too many re-tweets, mentions and URLs can be distracting unless there is original content intermixed. I'm excluding niche feeds, like NYTimes, which consists solely of links to New York Times articles with short headlines. But, you'll notice if you follow that feed, they never abbreviate in those headlines. They even put periods between the letters in N.F.L.

So, the question: Do abbreviations save time and space, or are they just... irritating?

Jordan Miller