Dear Twitter Friend.<\/p>\n
I have been following you for a while now.\u00a0It’s important to understand that I only follow people who I like; I only follow people who have ‘a voice’ that I consider to be ‘a good read’ at the time I check them out, before following. In a nutshell, I follow people who display an interesting personality in 140-characters. Because that, in itself, is a challenge.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, though, as much as I did enjoy reading your ‘voice’ at the outset, I have now had to unfollow you.<\/p>\n
Instead of coming back to me to ask why I’ve unfollowed you (and let’s face it, that’s a really weird thing for you to do),\u00a0I’ve produced this handy, cut-out-and-keep guide that lists the most likely reasons.<\/p>\n
I hope this information is helpful to you:<\/p>\n
1. You engaged on one\u00a0over-long\u00a0rant too many<\/strong> Or…<\/p>\n 2. You are guilty of the *repeated* use of incorrect grammar<\/strong> Or…<\/p>\n 3. You are guilty of *repeatedly* retweeting content that contains misplaced apostrophes<\/strong> Or…<\/p>\n 4. You treat Twitter as if it was your personal SMS service Or…<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0You are guilty of *repeatedly* retweeting content that contains the scandalous yet obvious misuse of your, you’re; too, two, to, or have committed any other crime against the English Language that even my 13-year old daughter knows better than to commit<\/strong> And that, for now, is pretty much it.<\/p>\n So if I’ve unfollowed you in the last few days, and you feel that the reason I may have unfollowed you isn’t in this little list, please feel free to add what you believe your crime may have been, to the comments below.<\/p>\n Thanks.<\/p>\n And…<\/p>\n Merry Christmas!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Twitter Friend. I have been following you for a while now.\u00a0It’s important to understand that I only follow people who I like; I only<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTwitter has a 140-character limit for a reason. Due to, presumably, insanity on your part, you have, in the past, tried to work around that limit by producing a series of tweets. So let me give you a heads-up. A 23-tweet, 2,510-character, 423-word rant about *anything at all* is unacceptable. There is no excuse for this behaviour at all. I strongly advise you to get a Facebook page, or a blog, and dump your rant there. Then, once you’re proof-read and corrected the content, you could put out just one tweet that linked to it. How about that as an acceptable solution? And if you do have a Facebook page and\/or a blog and no-one reads it, just sit back for a few minutes and ask yourself why that might be?<\/p>\n
\nLook, neither the word\u00a0Tory’s, nor the word Torys are acceptable substitutes for the word Tories. The latter is correct, by the way, the first two are completely, unacceptably wrong. This *repeated* abuse of English is a crime of ignorance. Wake up! If you can’t live by the rules of the English language, you should move to another country, one where they speak a language which you are capable of using correctly.<\/p>\n
\nLook, this really is very simple. If you are unable to correct misplaced apostrophes in tweets *before* you retweet, you either don’t care about the people who receive your mutilated content, or you’re a village idiot. If you repeatedly retweet content with misplaced apostrophes you will be considered to be the latter and, as a consequence, you will get unfollowed. Live with the judgement. Or improve your understanding of the English language.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>There is, admittedly, a line that falls between a public social network such as Twitter, and a private means of communication such as SMS. But it isn’t a difficult line to find. Most of us know where it is. You, apparently, do not. You have repeatedly used the wrong tool for the job. It’s the use of the word ‘repeatedly’ there that you should pay attention to. We have all, at some stage or other, pushed out a tweet to a wider audience than it should have addressed. But working your way through your entire address book, sending ‘Merry Christmas’ tweets to everyone you know (and therefore, sending those tweets to everyone in your timeline)? Do you really consider this is acceptable? Really?<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>This is a black and white situation. You have within your power, the ability to MT not RT someone else’s content. This means you can edit and correct their grammar crime, and you can do this *before* you pass his\/her content on to the rest of the world. If you don’t – and once again, the use of the word ‘repeatedly’ figures large in this – you will be unfollowed.<\/p>\n