This study explored how college freshmen at a mid-sized public university in north-eastern United States used Twitter, an anytime/anywhere writing technology, to support and promote the writing process by using tweets as a pre-writing activity. Two of the authors taught a joint course of First Year Seminar and Basic Reading in which the same group of students enrolled. Students in First Year Seminar used Twitter every week to input their ideas and thoughts about their experiences of the first year at the university with the goal of collaboratively combining these into a ‘Freshman Survival Guide’ at the end of the semester. The findings indicate that Twitter as a technological tool helps students generate ideas that turned into a formal written text by going through a series of traditional writing processes. In addition, it appears that the nature of their writing development is affected by authenticity, collaboration, effective writing instruction, and instructional support of technology use in academic context.