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In 140 characters or less: Ashesi uses Twitter to encourage better writing among students

Inspired by the work of one writer, Ashesi turns to Twitter to help students learn the art of wit and brevity.

Last week, the Ashesi Communications Committee – a team of lecturers and administrators that work to improve communication skills in the Ashesi student community – ran a competition asking students of Ashesi’s freshman class to use Twitter to write engaging micro-stories based on news headlines around the world.

The competition was inspired by the work of Nigerian/American writer, Teju Cole, who uses Twitter’s 140-character limit to write super-brief Twitter narratives inspired by the old French journalistic practice of ‘faits divers‘. More than just summarisations however, Cole manages to inject creative flair (and sometimes dark humour) into the stories in spite of the word limitation. The Ashesi student tweets run with the hashtag, ‘#AshCC’ – an abbreviation for the Ashesi Communications Committee.

At the end of the competition week, the committee received a total of 192 unique entries (289 tweets, counting retweets, comments and questions from inside and outside the Ashesi community). The winning entries were judged based on good use of English (no spelling/grammatical mistakes, abbreviations, text speak et al.), literary elegance and flair.

“It was very difficult for the judges to decide on the winning entries,” said Kobina Graham, a member of the Communications Committee, lecturer and head of Ashesi’s Writing Centre. “Some tweets were genuinely brilliant but had spelling or grammatical mistakes. Other entries had good ideas, but showed little literary flair or had poor and inelegant execution. We had a lot of fun though, with several tweets leaving the judging panel in stitches.”

After all entries had been reviewed, the judges agreed that the winner was Nii Apa ‘15 (@niiapa), who tweeted about the recent plane crash in Ghana. His tweet read: “Shortly after assumed take-off, the Allied Air cargo plane, bus, and road, collided in a disaster of minuscule epic proportions.”

The two runner-ups were Kevin Banful (@DJ_K3V, who tweeted about former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s jail sentence: “A political force in the prime of his life, Charles was used to making big decisions. At 64, his next 50 years was decided for him.”) and Nanette Taylor (@Qwickblack, who tweeted about singer Rihanna: “Rihanna got hurt. She got free. She is collaborating with hurt again. Stupidity, forgiveness or revenge? The story is still unwritten.”)

Nii receives tickets to the Silverbird Cinema in Accra, with the two runners-up receiving a ticket each. Congratulations to all three winners!

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