1. If there is a poetics to the twitter essay -- a big if -- it's a poetics of shared time, of unfolding words at a deliberate pace.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
2. As McLuhan and Ong have taught us, printed words are orality turned into space: words on a page sit next to each other in alignment.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
3. Of course careful poets and prose writers can control time to some degree. Write speedy sentences. Quick. To the point.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
4. And if a writer wants the reader to take more time, as she sometimes does, she can make sentence dawdle, malinger, in the Jamesian manner
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Replying to @HeerJeet
5. But the craft of speeding up sentences, or slowing them down, can only get you so far. Readers are in control of the reading speed.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
6. Some readers will race through a prose & poetry, some will linger over every syllable. The reader is in the driver's seat.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
7. With twitter-essay, what you get is a new way for the writer to have some say in the pace of reading. Twitter-essay unfolds in real time.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
8. As with love-making, there is an art to anticipation, to deferring gratification, to foreplay.
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@craig_burley You don't believe in foreplay, I take it. More's the pity.
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