Twitter - Can it Make You a Better Technical Writer?

Copyblogger's Jennifer Blanchard thinks so and I completely agree.  According to the post "How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer",  Twitter helps writers in three ways:

1. Twitter forces you to be concise.
2. Twitter forces you to exercise your vocabulary.
3. Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills.

Being fairly new to Twitter, I find myself constantly editing my tweets (the Twitter word for posts) to fit the 140 character limit.  Because of this limit, you do have to be careful about what and how you choose to write your messages.

How does Twitter force you to be concise?
There is no getting around being brief. You write more than 140 characters, your message doesn't get sent. You learn fast, capture the gist of what you want to say, and quickly send it out.

Why do you need to exercise your vocabulary?
If you only have 140 characters and have to be concise, you want to choose the most effective words to get your message across without using ones you don't. So you start thinking about ways to say what you want with creative word choice and not extra sentences. Each word matters. When each word matters you think about them a lot more.

What's editing have to do with anything?
Because of being concise and evaluating each word choice, you often have to re-read your messages quite frequently to evaluate whether it's what you meant to say. But, you don't have all day to edit a tweet. Twitter forces you to write better in shorter amounts of time because a medium like this is all about being timely. The posts need to be fast yet good. You can't compromise quality just because it's a microblog. And, you want to send out good content that relfects well on the rest of your content and your skills. Editing well and quickly is of essence.

So how does this help technical writers?
Well a good portion of help authoring is to deliver information as effectively and efficiently as possible so users can get back to the task they were trying to accomplish. Technical information isn't prose or poetry. No one wants to read a book on how to turn on the computer. A tool like Twitter can make you aware of how important each word choice is but it can also teach you to get your message across sooner. As well, I find it encourages creativity in being effective. Creativity is always an important tool in staying relevant in technical communication as well as learn how to meet your users' needs with less space and words. People want help with their problem now and then to move on. Twitter is great then for teaching technical writers to focus on one problem or message and quickly move onto the next task. What do you think? Do you agree? Or, do you think tools and mediums like Twitter are ruining the English language?