A Small Case Study of Tweets

 Before this semester, I honestly did not realize how insane the language used on Twitter was. I have never paid more attention to how my friends and even the celebrities I follow word their tweets, and what works for their audiences and what doesn’t. Now that I have read about McCulloch’s types of the typographical tone of voice, I can totally see how we are mimicking our spoken words in different visual patterns as we type. For this post, I’ll show pics of different types of tweets that I like a lot, and I’ll analyze why each is unique in its application of McCulloch’s list of typographic moves that indicate the tone of voice. 

First, I’ll start with a recent one I came across talking about Taylor Swift (Here is the link to the song that is referenced):

In this tweet, the user uses the physical placement of the m’s to indicate a rise and decline of the sound they are asking you to imagine. They also pick a reference from one of her older songs to imitate, thus confirming that other people will understand the reference. Since the song literally starts with the “mhm” sound, they chose lower case m’s to indicate a softer sound and spaced them out to replicate the nature of a song. The spaces are there to remind the reader to hold out the sound of those m’s, instead of asking for pausing in between them, creating an “m-m-m-m” sound. The effect is sharing a kind of inside joke with Taylor and her fans. 

This next tweet is one that makes me eternally grateful for Twilight twitter:

In the original tweet, they use the proper capitalization of the movie title and the character’s name, indicating they took the time to make sure they were both emphasized. The symbol (>) is a math symbol nearly everyone knows as “greater than” thus suggesting that Jasper is greater than something. Since there is nothing on the other side of the “equation,” one can surmise that they prefer Jasper over anything else that can be put into that space. The response is written in the style of “minimalist typography” that McCulloch coins in Because Internet (139). This indicates the user typed the message out quickly. However, the word fool is all in caps. The emphasis was placed in order to increase the humor of the tweet and as a way of placing extra meaning on the word. The deliberate decision to not capitalize Edward showed just how unimportant the user viewed Edward as. In other words, he is inferior in their eyes.

Finally, here is an interesting one that uses a version of the asterisks McCulloch talks about in reference to how people indicate deadpan snark or other forms of irony (138-39):

To state the obvious, the tweet appears to be mostly constructed of most actions described through words, with a comment at the end on the unstated actions. However, the main point lies in the actions that are not seen. The asterisk not only provides an ironic punchline but gives the audience insight into what has previously happened off-screen. In a play, the contents of the asterisk would be part of the stage directions or in the dialogue leading up to the ending statement. The ending statement is also typed out in “minimalist typography,” indicating that the 27-year-old version of the tweeter is too busy or tired to type the sentence out completely.

Very often nowadays, we use our typography to reflect our gestures and reactions to what we are writing. This mirroring effect is often found in poetry, so it is highly likely that people have adopted poetic prose into their own writing unintentionally.

Works Cited: McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019.