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Katya Cepeda
Olivia Rines
UWRT 1101
February 9,2015

Tweets, 140-character postings made to the incredibly popular social media

website Twitter, are a genre that millions of people unknowingly take part in each day.
Through tweets, users can share their thoughts, rant about things like the latest political
campaign, TwitPic their Starbucks order or outfit of the day, promote their businesses,
or even tweet something clever and include a clever hashtag. Twitters possibilities are
endless, and the number of users is growing phenomenally. Because we live in an everexpanding, technology obsessed world, I chose to analyze tweets as a genre. I want to
be able to identify the true purpose and meaning behind communicating and socializing
through 140-character posts.
Twitter is a social networking site that is primarily used to share what a person is
doing in any given moment with people online. If you were to long onto Twitter and
casually scroll through your TimeLine, a stream of Tweets from accounts you have
chosen to follow on Twitter(Twitter), then you would see a variety of Tweets. You would
see a friend of yours tweet Had so much fun at the UNCC basketball game last night!
#GoNiners!, or perhaps see a Tweet from your favorite band announcing their new tour
dates. These examples show that Twitter is primarily a way to distribute all sorts of
information, whether its very relevant or completely random. In a recent study done by
market-research firm Pear Analytics, 2,000 tweets were analyzed throughout a twoweek period, and were sorted into six different categories. The study found that 40%
was pointless babble, 38% was conversational, 9% was pass-along value, 6% was selfpromotion, 4% was spam, and the last 4% was news. Overall, the study found that
Tweets are short bursts of inconsequential information.

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All tweets vary in purpose. They can be narrative, argumentative, descriptive,
and/or expository. A majority of tweets would be narrative and/or expository. Generally,
when a person tweets, he/she will try to narrate an event that is happening to him/her at
that given point in time, whether he/she is live Tweeting from a sports event or
commenting on a show that he/she is currently watching. Narrative tweets also
intertwine with expository Tweets, because the Tweeter is attempting to explain and

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describe to his/her followers what he/she is doing. Many Tweets fall under the
argumentative category. One of Twitters main functions is to express an opinion, and
often, users will attempt to convince their fellow followers to feel the same way that they
do about a certain topic.
A Tweet is composed of a number of different things. If you were to dissect a
Tweet, you would, of course, find the intended Tweet itself. Perhaps the Tweet is even
being directed towards somebody, or mentioning another user, which is determined by
whether or not the Tweet contains @username somewhere in the body of the Tweet
itself. You may also find a hashtag, a word or phrase preceded by a # that is ever-sopopularly used to identify specific topics on twitter, being used in a clever way. All of
these factors make up a Tweet, and show how different types of Tweets can be defined
by multiple features.
More often than not, a tweet mentioning another Tweeter would most likely be
expository, because