Twitter’s 140 character limit is absurdly low, especially for type-crazy tweeters, but can create unique opportunities for creative users.
 “Posts on Twitter are limited to 140 characters, which makes for a nice formal restriction,” Nick Lantz, primarily a poet, said according to his website http://nick-lantz.com.  “I find this notion of a small, self-contained unit of poetry (not quite a poem, but capable of standing alone) very appealing.”
 Many authors on Twitter talk about their work and keep in touch with fans, but others, such as Lantz (We Don’t Know We Don’t Know) and John Wray (The Right Hand of Sleep), post 140 character stories and poems to the public.
 While Lantz posts small poems, Wray uses his Twitter account to post parts of a novel, 140 characters at a time.
 “[It’s] a lot harder than I anticipated, of course, and a lot of good material has to be cut away,” Wray said in an e-mail to Poets & Writers 40, “but it’s probably a healthy exercise to be compelled to say things in as few words as possible.”
 Restriction and limitation is the essence of poetry, according to English teacher Joe May.  Enhancing every word is a prominent part of poems.
 “The English term for it is concision, saying the most you can in a limited amount of words.  It’s all about discipline,” May said.  “William Carlos Williams was doing the same thing in the early 20th century, writing poems with so few characters.”
 Although the majority of Twitter users do not use the service for creative writing, the 140 character limit restriction applies to each account and affects every tweeter.
 “[Twitter] made me summarize more, but it depends on what I’m posting.  I like to talk about what’s happening,” Erika Smolyar, sophomore, said.  “It’s more personal than Facebook.  On Facebook, you have so many and a lot of them don’t care about your statuses, but on Twitter, there [are] only a number of people that follow you because they want to read your status updates.”
 The number of people who use Twitter for writing remains low (less than one percent), according to an online survey of 294 people done by Top Rank, an online marketing blog.  However, there are organizations across the internet encouraging more people to join in the 140 character writing exercise, such as TwitterPoetry and TwiHaiku.
 On top of being useful in poetry, concision is a skill often used in English and document-based questions (DBQs) administered in social studies classes like AP European History and World History.
 In addition, some teachers, like Julie Bryniczka, math teacher and lacrosse coach, use Twitter to keep their students and teams updated.
 “[The 140 character limit] keeps it short and concise,” Bryniczka said.  “It’s nice that my girls can have a text message the second the schedule changes.”
 The restriction applies to every tweet, but how much it affects users is left up to what the account’s used for, according to May.
 “It could make people think about they want to say and how they want to say it,” May said, putting emphasis on ‘could’.  “I know that there are pretty ridiculous tweets, like ‘I had a sandwich today’, though.”