A while ago, Lucy Brazier, Editor of ‘The VA Magazine‘ and ‘Executive Secretary‘, approached me to ask whether I would host an #Adminchat on Twitter. Loving the idea of raising my profile in the Twittersphere, talking about the finer points of grammar and helping people with specific issues, I said, “Yes”!
For an hour last Thursday night, I fielded questions from all sides about the finer points of grammar. In just sixty minutes, hundreds of tweets flew around between myself, Lucy and everyone else who ‘attended’ the chat on Twitter. People were there from the UK, Canada and the US – and possibly other countries too, I was too busy typing to find out where everyone was based.
Being host, it was mainly my job to answer everybody’s questions. And boy is it hard to explain punctuation or the difference between an adverb and an adjective in 140 characters! I used ‘Tweetchat‘ so that I could only see tweets with #Adminchat in them (and Tweetchat automatically added #Adminchat to every tweet so I didn’t need to worry about that). With the screen set to update every six seconds, I was getting two or three tweets every time it refreshed for an hour. That, my friends, is pressure!
I love grammar and believe that rather than stifling the way people communicate, it enables us to express ourselves more clearly and for our meaning to be better understood by others; a simple mis-placed comma can make all the difference to the meaning of a sentence. I really enjoyed the chat and the hour went by in a flash. Thankfully it was a big success; within minutes of it finishing I was invited to host another one and offered the opportunity to write a series about grammar in a national magazine.
This little story is a preamble to showing you a different type of blog post, one that you may want to have a go at doing yourself: using embedded tweets. This great post from Social Media Examiner goes into detail about how to embed tweets and use them creatively. Below I have written a quick guide for those of you who don’t have time to read the post:
- go to ‘Expand’ at the bottom of a tweet
- hit ‘Details’
- then ‘Embed this tweet’
- choose the alignment you want
- then copy the HTML or Shortcode into your post
Done.
One tip, work out which tweets you are going to use and which order you want them to appear in before you start embedding them, it just makes it a bit quicker.
Below is an extract from Thursday night’s #Adminchat, which your blog post would look like (the numbering went a bit crazy for a while so please ignore that!)…
I am delighted to introduce tonight's host, Sally Mayor. #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
Q1: When do you use ‘I’ and when do you use ‘me’? #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
A1 Depends whether I / me is subject (I did it) or object (it was done to me) in sentence. Use I if subject, me if object. #adminchat
— Sally Mayor (@WordNerdSally) July 19, 2012
Q8 Can you explain how to use onto / on to and into / in to? #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
A8 Think about meaning. He got into/onto the box (actually in it or on it).He took me in to see her... contd #adminchat
— Sally Mayor (@WordNerdSally) July 19, 2012
A8 contd... in and to acting as separate words that just happen to be next to eachother.#adminchat
— Sally Mayor (@WordNerdSally) July 19, 2012
Q11 What is an infinitive and a split infinitive? #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
A11 Infinitive is ‘to do’ form of verb (to go). Split infinitive when adverb is inserted (to boldly go). I say OK to use them... #adminchat
— Sally Mayor (@WordNerdSally) July 19, 2012
RT @lucybrazier: Q12 When do I use ‘good’ and when do I use ‘well’? #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
A9 Good = adjective, describes a noun (a thing). Well = adverb, describes a verb (a doing word). Eg she sang a good song well. #adminchat
— Sally Mayor (@WordNerdSally) July 19, 2012
RT @clairebroderic2: Great stuff going on here.My first Twitterchat.Im loving it!Thank you - Glad you could join us :) #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
Don't forget that we will be here every Thursday moving forward at this time with world class trainers #adminchat
— ExecutiveSecretary(@lucybrazier) July 19, 2012
THANK YOU @wordnerdsally Fantastic chat! Thanks for hosting @lucybrazier #adminchat
— A.Tones (@A_Tones) July 19, 2012
Please let me know how you get on if you use embedded tweets on your blog, I’d love to see your posts. And feel free to leave me any questions or comments.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this please let others know about it by sharing it – thank you!
Thanks for reading.
