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I feel like Twitter does this for me. I'll go over the limit on a long tweet, and I'll go back and trim and exchange long words for short ones and remove words that don't contribute anything.

The result will fit, and basically say the same thing. I've never had to fundamentally alter the meaning of a tweet, I just make it shorter, which is a healthy writing exercise.

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I often find that to be true, too.

However, there are cases where there isn't enough space to articulate an idea. In those instances, I've tended to not Tweet at all.

Twitter is just a poor tool for communication of nontrivial ideas.

Yeah there's a pretty big difference between limiting yourself to 280 characters, and limiting yourself to 40 pages. Limiting yourself is great. Handicapping yourself is bad. I find the character limit in Twitter also contributes to society's increasingly poor grammar, as well.

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