Tweet Example: @filmtechstudent

Student Twitter Account, for Dr. Edwards’ English 1102 class in Spring of 2019.

Tweeting as a Class Assignment

As you probably already know, Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users to post 280-character observations, questions, and links. Twitter accounts can be public (anyone can read the tweets) or private (you give people permission to “follow” you). As a Twitter user, you can follow other users, which means that you will see their tweets appear in your Twitter feed.

A screenshot of the main page for the twitter account of @georgepburdell. Twitter users have a main page that shows their most recent tweets and retweets.

A conversation on a particular topic can be tagged with a hash tag—a pound sign (#) followed by a name or acronym (e.g., #ENGL1101). By searching for the hash tag, you can follow all the tweets pertaining to a particular conversation. Some instructors ask students to tweet during class discussions to create a backchannel (i.e., a separate conversation going on in the background). Other instructors use Twitter to allow students to comment on student presentations as they are happening or to participate in a silent discussion during a movie viewing. Similarly, Twitter can be used outside of class for asynchronous discussion. By following the hash tag, you can tweet your ideas about the course reading and respond on your own time to the tweets of your classmates.

Analyzing Tweets

Contributed by Brittain Fellow Dr. Courtney Hoffman.

Rhetorical Situation and Choices

Purpose

Dr. Edwards’ Spring 2019 English 1102 class studied how technology affected the process of adapting texts to film. Students were required to watch film adaptations and live tweet their reactions. For this assignment, Twitter functioned as a kind of journal, through which students could record and reflect on their developing knowledge of film technologies. They could also communicate with each other about the films, reading and responding to what their classmates tweeted, through the use of a hashtag that gathered all their tweets onto a single page.

Audience

Twitter is a social media platform, which means that anyone can see what you tweet. Here, the student’s primary audience is their classmates and instructor, but the tweets are available to all who view them. This very broad audience is something that the student factors into their word choice and style, as well as their use of hashtags to help their classmates find their work amidst the cacophony of tweets on the site.

Rhetorical Appeals

Throughout the Twitter thread, the student uses pathos (specifically humor) in order to express their interpretation of the films they watched for class. Their inclusion of gifs also evokes pathos, but appeals to common beliefs and experiences by utilizing familiar images and referencing other movies so that their knowledge base is clear (e.g. ethos).

Modes & Media

Twitter as a medium can be both advantageous — if you want to reach a large audience — or difficult to use. It’s easy to get lost among the chatter. The student’s use of hashtags and gifs incorporates the visual and electronic modes in order to refine their point, and to reach a very particular audience.

Elements of the Genre

Concise text: Because Twitter limits each tweet to 280 characters, you need to say what you want to say with precision. This student does so — and is able to convey a lot of meaning with a series of brief statements with their live tweeting while viewing the film.

Speed of communication: Tweeting is an instantaneous medium. What you tweet is broadcast immediately to the web. And make sure you are careful about typos, since you can’t edit your tweets.

Images, other graphics, or multimedia: This student uses gifs and images from the films they are viewing to supplement their tweets. Emojis are also common, as are links to URLs, video clips, and audio files.

Style

This student incorporates an informal style into their tweets, which suggests their comfort with their intended audience and implies authenticity of their reactions to the films in the moment. Tweets can also be formal, and in the case of the President’s Twitter account, represent national policy. Even people in positions of authority sometimes have fun on Twitter; if you find Tech’s president, Dr. Cabrera, on Twitter, he has tweeted about riding in the Wreck as well as issuing congratulations to sports teams or to faculty and students for award-winning research.

Design

Much of the design on Twitter is limited by the platform’s own design: the blue checkmark, the placement of your avatar, the heart reaction below the tweet’s body. But adventurous tweeters might utilize emojis or punctuation marks to create images not available using text alone (have you ever seen a tweet with an image of a wall, and a person peeking out from behind it?). The student whose Twitter thread is shown above incorporates images and gifs into the design of their tweets, which helps break up the monotony of alphanumeric text on the screen, followed by hashtags to aid in searching for their work. The re-tweet function allows for an interesting visual variation, as well: the tweet-within-a-tweet.

Sources

In the Twitter thread above, the student expresses their own reactions to the films they watched with their class and incorporating gifs and emojis available on the platform. Most often, URLs that are hyperlinked from a tweet serve as the only cited sources on Twitter. When you don’t have many characters to convey your message, you’re not going to include a full MLA citation. But you’re also usually expressing your own thoughts in your tweets, rather than sharing what another person has created. If you use Twitter to promote someone else’s ideas, you will need to include some kind of citation. A link to the original work, perhaps, or to a document with all of your citations on it would be appropriate.

Text for this page came from Chapter 12 in WOVENText, 2021 edition.