Action Verbs–Twitter Style

Twitter: What *are* people doing? :: Now I Have a Blog Too

Back in my career services days, we used to spend a lot of time putting together our infamous action verb list for students to use in preparing their resumes. Now Twitter answers the question about what people are really doing as they move throughout their days. Based on a sample of 500,000 tweets Chris Finke has compiled the most common ‘-ing’ verbs and the number of times they appeared in the 500,000 messages.”

We always had students write in the -ed form to focus on the fact that they had already used the skills. A few words are missing from the Tweets list that always found their way onto the typical career services list: things like systematized and supervising and prioritizing. The Twitter top 10:

  1. going
  2. watching
  3. listening
  4. getting
  5. playing
  6. working
  7. trying
  8. reading
  9. waiting
  10. looking
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