Twitter Fiction is a writing style which limits a story to only 140 characters. I learned about this style of writing after doing some research that stemmed from curiosity when I was assigned to write a 55 word story in my masters program. I loved how writing only 55 words made me really look closely at my word choices. I knew that this kind of a challenge would be right up my students' alleys. I decided to bring this exercise to my writing workshop just after a long school break. Students were sharing events from their holiday orally when I introduced the Twitter writing activity. I briefly talked about how Twitter allows only 140 characters but that I would adapt their limit to 140 words. My students are in 3rd grade so I wanted to make sure the challenge wasn't about limiting their words to a low word count but rather that the focus would be on the goal of writing exactly 140 words. The results were great! At first students were unsure of what this would be like and they just started writing. We used the Pages App for the word count feature and then copied and pasted the writing back into the Google Doc for co-editing. Once students saw how many words they were typing they got more interested in the challenge. As students neared 140 words they started to get picky. They looked back at what they wrote with a critical eye and began to edit with intensity I have not seen before. They were excited and during partner feedback they gave feedback that was really useful which challenged the writers to adjust their writing again to make sure it fit 140 words and was a strong story. The next step is to ask them to rewrite the same story in only 55 words to attempt the 55 word story style. They are already anxious to start editing.
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Kate White
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