- Okay for the video.
I need you to pretend to be me on Twitter.
- Excuse me?
- Thank you to the Great Courses plus
for sponsoring this video.
(snapping fingers sound)
Hello, how's it going?
I am Taha
and I am what some people
would consider an extremely online person.
Basically I tweet a lot
and sometimes people ask me why I tweet so weirdly
maybe using commas in a strange way
or formatting tweets very specifically.
And I didn't really have an answer for why it be like that.
it just be,
until I got this text from my dad
asking me how I was
and it got me thinking about why when older people text
they always seem so blunt or
tonally off.
I mean, clearly my dad, isn't trying to be blunt with me.
He's literally asking me how I am,
but something about the way that older people text
made me feel off.
And I never really had a good answer for this
until I started learning about informal writing.
Now, informal writing is something that we do
all of the time when we tweet or caption an Instagram
or text people.
In the before times you would basically
spend your social life communicating verbally
through your face and body,
and basically only write informally
in a diary or through a letter
but due to technology and especially social media
informal writing has really seen
a rise in popularity
and being a generation that's grown up online,
we've really learned to express our voice tone
and personalities through text
better than any generation before.
The use of text in informal context can express a lot more
than what we've formerly been taught in schools.
You kind of already know this
just, deep down in your heart.
So let's talk about it.
For example, we can put emphasis on certain words
to approximate inflections that we might find verbally
"how are you?"
becomes different to "how ARE you?"
or 'how are youu?"
but there's way more
than just capitals or even approximating verbal tonality.
Typographical tone of voice can become unique
to the written media.
Full stop can indicate bluntness
passive aggressiveness, or hostility.
All caps can indicate excitement,
shouting or other strong feeling.
The Tilde is the squiggly line often used to
indicate sarcasm or whimsy.
Crossed-out text can indicate
a thought that was going to be said
but was decided against.
Communicating subtleties that otherwise would be lost.
If someone replied to, "how are you" with the phrase
I'm fine.
They could mean very different things
given the typographical tone of voice being used.
~I'm fine~ is a very different response to I'm fine.
I'm FINE.
I'M fine.
I'm fine.
Even though the actual words themselves are the same
what is communicated can vary.
However, what's seen as a neutral turn can vary wildly
especially between young people who grew
up learning to communicate socially
on the internet.
And those who didn't.
And that's how you get a text
like my dad's coming across as tonally blunt
Given who I am
and how much time I spend online.
I see the full stop as a indication of tone
whereas my dad just sees it
as a way of splitting up two different thoughts.
Personally I would have sent those two thoughts
as two different texts
or put a couple of commas in between instead of a full stop.
What's really interesting about informal writing
is not only do the norms change
from generation to generation
but everyone has their own personality and tones of voice.
And that all comes across
in how we write informally to each other.
It's like we all have our own typographical fingerprints
I thought I'd see if I could teach my friends to write
in my typographical tone of voice
by giving them my Twitter account?
My plan is to create a guide
based on what I've learned about informal writing.
To help my friends write the way that I would
Then, send them the guide.
They'd write some tweets,
we would tweet them ,
and we'd see if anyone notices
that there were imposters among us.
So, I researched my own tweets
getting somewhat distracted in the process
Until
I had a rough guide.
Hello, I've been at this for a couple of...
I think I've got everything I need to get from Twitter
But
this,
is what it looks like.
Look at my work.
Do you like it?
So now I'm going to transfer all of this information
into the only app that productivity YouTubers use nowadays.
(keyboard clicking)
Wow.
So I can send it to my friends.
Then I digitized it,
recruited some friends.
Okay for the video.
I need you to pretend to be me on Twitter.
- [Melissa] Excuse me?
(chuckling)
- Amazing.
Thank you Melissa.
And sent them the guide.
- Hello?
- Hello.
- Did Taha ask you to write tweets?
- Yeah. What the heck ?
- Did you see his style guide thing?
- Yeah, I did.
- So punctuation.
Always use two commas
where you would normally use one comma.
- His style guide is basically just add more punctuation.
- He's like literacy, I do not see.
- I think I'm just going to tweet about orange juice
and then just you know throw some comments in there.
There you go.
Taha tweet.
- Wait, send it, I want to see it.
- How's that?
- That looks like a Taha tweet
- I'm the ghost writer of..... Can't Stop Me.
- But genuinely I, that looks like a real tweet.
Are we even going to be able to tell the difference
between what's real and what's fake?
- The takeaway is Taha isn't real.
(laughter)
- Okay, bye.
- Okay
(snapping fingers sound)
So it's been a couple of days,
I got the tweets from my friends,
I tweeted them out and nobody noticed.
I think it was a combination
of the fact that the style guide was pretty comprehensive,
The fact that on Twitter, nobody cares.
And also the fact that my friends kind of already know
who I am,
but that was kind of easy mode.
Nobody was trying to spot a fake,
so, it was pretty easy
for us to just blend into the background.
But now,
we're going to put that to the test.
I'm going to give you a couple of tweets that I have written
and one tweet that I didn't write.
And I'm going to leave it up to you guys in the comments
to figure out which one's which.
If you guys aren't easily able to distinguish
between the imposter and the.. not imposter
then I guess we succeeded?
Oh, by the way,
if you're interested in the style guide that I made
we'll be sending it out via our newsletter,
so if you aren't already subscribed subscribe, it's free.
We only send it out once a month
so it's not really going to bother your inbox.
So why not give it a shot?
Oh I don't know.
Maybe.
I don't know
So here's the interesting thing.
Not only have I created a guide
on how to impersonate myself online,
but, I've also learned that,
the way that I write informally
through twitter or text
isn't bad writing or immature.
It's actually a highly developed form of language.
It's a way that we communicate tone,
voice and personality through text.
And,
that's pretty cool.
So the next time someone asks you
why do you tweet so weird?
You can send them this video
and give us views
because ,we like views.
Welcome to YouTube.
Hello,
It is End Screen Taha.
If you liked watching the video
as much as I enjoyed making it,
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on how digital technology affects us
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(upbeat music)
That's the end of the video.