Keep words of wisdom
Concise, short and sweet,
like a haiku or a tweet
Minh Tan (see haiquote version)
If you’ve got words of wisdom to share, it has to be “catchy” for people to remember it. Catchy is the wrong word, of course, because it’s not about rapping sort of rhyme, sounding hip or such. It just needs to say what it needs to say, in as few words as possible to be easier to remember, with a little something memorable to it if you can phrase it in such a way. Two short “literary forms” came to mind as I thought about examples, which were the traditional 17 syllable Japanese haiku poems and the very contrasting 140 character tweet. The haiku has two 5 syllable lines and a 7 syllable line in some configuration of three lines, while the tweet is just 140 characters or less, straight.
From my initial concept of this quote, I only had to add in the word concise to make it a haiku, at least in structure, for which I have the link above. However, I did not add a word for the sake of making it a haiku. Concise is relevant because just short and sweet would have been like catchy, lacking something more serious.
The quote, including terminal period, is barely have a full tweet at 71 characters.
These two guidelines will be my aim for all my quotes written. That means I will use these haiku and tweet criteria as rough standards to aim for rather than to obey strictly like a law. It’s a nice size to roll off the tongue and/or to scribe down on a piece of paper, whether small or large.
The only problem with the haiku created from these quotes is that they mostly lacked the nature component to a haiku, and also flowed too much like prose, which they were. So I came up with a portmanteau name for them to call them haiquote, which I will blog about in a few days.
Digital Citizen 