The tweet book

Last night I found a new book format called the tweet book. It has a few short introductions to each chapter, but most of the book consists of 140 related tweets that discuss a single topic.

The book I read was written by a professor of rhetoric, George Gopen. His other two academic tomes are out of my price range (Sense and Structure for $79.99 and Expectations for $106.66) but the ebook for Gopen’s Reader Expectation Approach to the English Language was only 99 cents.

His work focuses on reader expectations. Readers use structure to extract much of the meaning from a sentence, not substance. Authors tend to think the words make meaning, but the position of the words conveys much of the meaning. Position helps the reader answer four main questions.

1. What is happening?
2. Whose story is this?
3. How does this sentence connect to other sentences?
4. Which words get emphasis?

The tweet book is interesting, especially since much of his work is expensive to access. I found a talk Gopen gave on iDW that is free on YouTube, but his Vimeo course costs $600 if you want to access anything past the first episode.

I feel like the tweet book is that one little thing that gets the author’s foot in the door. If the reader likes the book enough, he might buy one of the academic books. Next thing you know the reader is hiring Gopen as a one-on-one coach or attending one of his two-day lectures.