Here's the problem with Twitter: It makes me even lazier than I already am.
Why flesh out a fleeting thought into an entire piece of writing when I can instead spend 15 minutes struggling to fit it all into 140 characters while trying not to cop out and turn whole words into single vowels? I suppose it forces me to write snappier sentences, but the fact that I've lost the patience needed to sit down and write a paragraph is troubling. At some point someone drilled into my head that paragraphs should generally be at least four or five sentences. I have to cheat to attain those kinds of lofty numbers. Here is a fifth sentence.
At any rate, Twitter was advertising a book for awhile that was a collection of the world's most humorous twitter posts (I refuse to call them "tweets" in this entry. I can use an infinite number of characters in this unrestricted space so there’s no need to shorten that phrase. In fact, let’s just go ahead and call them "user generated Twitter character strings").
Okay, I'll admit: If I was using Twitter, that gratuitous parenthetical comment wouldn't have made it to print and you'd remember what it was I was trying to tell you before I interrupted myself which was this: Twitter made a book of funny Twitter quotes (that's right, you may have noticed I used double colons in that sentence which is a rare grammatical feat. It comes in handy when you're being needlessly wordy and probably also if you have rectal cancer or have to take a really big poop).
The whole thing is 140-character quotes with the Twitter brand slapped on each sentence. That's it. That's the glue that holds the book together. If you traveled back in time, renamed the project "The Hilarious Book of Really Short Sentences Often with Awkward Abbreviations," and tried to get a publishing deal, someone would probably point out that that's a really awful title. Then that person would go on to tell you that "really short sentences" is not a theme, it's a stupid handicap on your ability to collect funny things. It's like opening a pet store and shaving all your puppies before you sell them.
Sometimes it helps to throw in a little fur even if you have to deal with the occasional tangle (parenthetical or otherwise).
