My guess?  Not much.  It slips away, lost in the collection of tweets that came before and after.  But before it does, it steals the little bit of exigence that, over time, builds up and becomes a blog post.

Or maybe not – but it seems to happen that way to me – tweets discharge the writing mojo that builds up into pushes to publish posts.  There’s value in the short form – but I think there’s more value in long form, in writing that pushes the writer.  The tweets need to go somewhere, to lead to something.  So I’m going to try a couple of things in my own practice over the next few weeks and see where they take me.

First, whenever it’s practical, I’m going to try to come to a blog and write whenever I feel the urge to tweet.  Might mean some short posts, might mean slightly longer ones.  Might shut me up completely for a while.  We’ll see.  If I do find myself tweeting in spite of my little push, and I expect I will – Twitter’s an exceptionally useful piece of my workflow, even as I find some destructiveness in it, I’m going to try to take a moment once a week and pull out some short statements that could use a bit of explanation or elaboration.  Really, I’m hoping to let my tweets become writing reminders or prompts for me here on the blog. I’ll be using Twitter Tools to push a weekly digest of tweets to the blog, making my utterances in one place fodder for more utterance in another. Looking at that digest will also give me a way to review my Twitter behavior on a regular basis – which probably isn’t a bad idea.  I’ve seen Dan do this on our district Help Desk blog, and I think that might be useful, at least for me.  If it gets in your way, let me know.

Not sure if any changes to my writing habits will develop, but I’d like for them to.  Like I said, we’ll see.  But I know I need to mix things up a bit to push myself.  Too much Twitter means not enough depth.