Session 14: How to Write a Tweetorial

Twitter threads have become a popular medium for explaining technical concepts, expounding on everything from dung beetle navigation to opposition research to why our fingertips get wrinkly in the bath. Twitter threads are incredibly popular among journalists as well, who use the medium to break or summarize a story, explain something they’ve learned while reporting, or build an audience for their beat. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to engage a Twitter audience on a topic of your own expertise. We’ve been studying these Twitter tutorials, or “tweetorials”, as an emerging communication genre with a set of strategies unique to the form. We will break down examples to show you what makes a tweetorial engaging and clear, and then do writing and revision exercises using strategies we have developed. If we have time, we’ll test-run some automatic feedback tools we’ve been developing to help writers create an engaging and intriguing first tweet that draws readers in.