The next level? 140-character paragraphs

The micro-blogging site Twitter announced on Thursday that it had 50 million users who log on at least once a day. Many journalists now routinely use the service, which limits messages to 140 characters in length, to keep across breaking news and in touch with contacts. But one BBC Online journalist, Conor Spackman, took things to the next level: he wrote a news story about Twitter being allowed in Northern Ireland courts consisting entirely of paragraphs of 140 characters:

Here, he reflects on how and why he did it:

Writing every paragraph of a story about Twitter in exactly 140 characters is clearly a gimmick. However, it also contains a broader lesson.

For all journalists, writing with brevity is not only an aspiration but what we should do every time we take out a pen or sit at a keyboard.

But when our copy is written, how many of us genuinely take some time to check through it, reflecting upon whether all the words are needed?

The first draft of the piece about Twitter being used in court in Northern Ireland for the first time was written the way I write any story.

So when I had the idea of the gimmick, I was cutting the story back rather than starting from scratch. I suspect this makes it a lot easier.

Of course, my primary concern throughout was the editorial integrity of the story and preserving that was always going to be a sine qua non.

But as I moved through each paragraph, honing carefully, I realised that, if anything, the story was actually going to be the better for it.

Have a look at it and see what you think. I worried it might seem a bit clunky or a bit contrived but reading through it now, it looks fine.

There was a lot of verbosity in the original piece which added little. I realised it did not need to be there to effectively tell the story.

You might say that to do this, you sometimes need to add words you would not normally in order to make the sentence exactly 140 characters.

There's some truth in that but, on the whole, it is broadly driving you to be more concise and that makes it a good exercise for you to try.

Yes, you need to have a pretty broad vocabulary and an occasional bit of ingenuity but those are not qualities BBC journalists are short of.

It will not take as long as you think. It took me around 45 minutes to cut the original story into the 140 character paragraphs you see now.

Please promise me one thing though. In the finest BBC tradition, check that all the paragraphs are 140 and there isn't the odd one with 139.

I can assure you that you will be glad you checked. If you see any with 139 here, then please do not contact me. I am retiring while on top.