PB1A

A textual genre that I am very familiar with is a tweet especially since I am on Twitter on a daily basis. I go on Twitter and read tweets pretty often everyday. Occasionally, I would tweet out my own or retweet other people’s tweets so I am fairly familiar with its rhetorical features and conventions. Twitter is one of the biggest social media sites in connecting people with each other from all around the world. It is popular for features that are unique to only Twitter unlike other social media sites such as Facebook.

Twitter includes many rhetorical features such as audience, purpose, and context. The audience of a tweet is usually a person’s followers. This can include friends and acquaintances from real life or over the internet. Tweets can be seen by anyone or a person can set their profile to private so that only people following can see the tweets. The purpose of a tweet is to spread and share information to their audience. This can include inner thoughts, special events, and promotions. The context of a tweet can be anything related to someone’s personal life or business-related. For personal use, people usually tweet about things going on in their life and it is very spontaneous. For businesses, tweets are probably planned and well-thought out for promoting certain products or deals. Generally, twitter has a very casual style and tone. Many tweets are formatted in ways very similar to the way people usually text.  Tweets usually consist of slang, abbreviations, and emojis, all of which are used when texting. The style of a tweet depends entirely on the person tweeting. Some people use correct grammar and punctuation when others will misspell and be grammatically incorrect. Similarly, the tone will be also based on the person, depending on the mood they are currently in. Whether a person is sad or happy, a person can convey this either explicitly stating it or they can implicitly imply it by tweeting out, for example, sad song lyrics. Some conventions of a tweet are the username, timestamps, trending topics, hash tags, favorites and retweets. The username is also part of the url to your twitter page followed by “twitter.com/”. Each tweet has a timestamp on it indicating how many minutes or hours ago you posted. A unique feature of Twitter is the ability to favorite and retweet a tweet. When you favorite a tweet, it just goes into your “Favorites” tab while retweeting posts someone else’s tweet on your twitter profile. Another convention of Twitter is your homepage, the timeline of all the tweets from everyone you follow. Your timeline is constantly updated as people are tweeting. New tweets will pop up and there is an endless scroll that allows you to see past tweets continuously. A tweet is a tweet for the fact that it is a short and quick message. A tweet can consist of at most 140 characters, which can really restrict all the things you want to say at once. However, you can also send out as many tweets as you want. A tweet allows people to connect over the internet through short messages.