With SMS and services like Twitter making a profound impact on how we communicate and stay in touch, it's imperative that we learn how to effectively use limited character space to get our message across. Twitter has a limitation of 140 characters, and SMS in general is 160 characters.

Although this can be good since it forces brevity, it can also sometimes be very difficult to fully express ourselves with such few characters. This is especially true for older generations just getting acclimated with texting, and may find it difficult to type full words on numeric keypads, only to run out of space after all that effort. How I would love to point my Mom to this article to help her brush up her texting skills.

General texting tips

In general, it's important to learn the art of saying a lot with only a few words. Rest assured, the more you text and use services like Twitter, the easier it will become. You'll start to catch yourself repeating things or otherwise typing meaningless words. You'll learn what words or phrases work the best for you when trying to illustrate your point.

Above all, don't force it. Let your tone be natural. If you worry about the character limit, your message will reflect that tightness, and may not come across the way you'd like.

Shorthand examples

In that vain, I am going to provide a brief list of shorthand text examples, which can help you save character space for more important words essential to your message meaning. This is, by no means, a complete list of shorthand text, but rather, some of the more common ones that I use. Please feel free to provide your own shorthand examples in the comments.

Also, these are not the typical abbreviations for multiple word phrases, such as "lol" for "laugh out loud." Rather, the examples here provide shorter alternatives for single words.

On the left is the actual word. On the right is a shorthand version of that word.

Becoming accostomed to typing these shorthand words will, at first, make you feel lazy, sloppy, or incoherent. It may also confuse your recipients. But eventually you'll appreciate the extra time you have away from typing out text messages. Every little bit helps.