Don’t Ask Twitter to Do Your Job

A request.

It would be wonderful if instead of having to do the less glamorous aspects of our jobs, they were done for us, for free, perhaps by an online tool. Luck would have it that for some of us — those with weak bodies and hunched backs and soft hands but, oh my goodness, such brilliant minds — this is the world we live in and the online tool is Google.com.

Don’t ask humans on Twitter to do the Google.com part of your job. (This is unsolicited advice.) Are there humans you can ask for help with your job? Yes. Humans you should ask to help: editors, people you know personally, people relevant to your research, the library lady. Humans you shouldn’t ask: everybody on Twitter.

A lot of writers do this. Not just one, or a couple. It’s a thing that people do. It’s an epidemic. “What are some good ones of these?” “How many of this has happened?” “What’s the main difference between these and those?” It’s lazy and uncouth. “Aren’t you lazy and uncouth?” Extremely. “And also don’t you know nothing?” Yes but today the focus is on you.

Imagine if professionals in other professions practiced similar practices. Imagine you visited your doctor and, after looking at your abdomen, she, the doctor is a woman, not because she is making a mistake, tweeted, “Hey has anyone ever had a patient with a growth on their abdomen?”

You would think, “This is alarming. I don’t expect the doctor to know everything, obviously, but I do wish the doctor looked this up in one of her medical texts privately, or consulted another doctor.” You would think something like that, I bet, and you would be right.

“What if I’m a comedian and I want to know the best tacos in Delaware, can I ask Twitter then?” Yes that’s fine but honestly, just speaking personally, I also dislike it. But I am very negative.

Please just leave Twitter alone. It has enough of its own issues.

Thank you.