attachments to CreativeWorks

first couple, of what will likely be many, implementation questions:

- how would folks recommend representing a short textual creative work like
a twitter post?  CreativeWork doesn't seem to have a place to put the body
of the post, so would that then require the use of Article (so you can use
articleBody)?  I guess for something like a tweet, you could potentially
put the full message into the description of a generic CreativeWork, but
that doesn't seem to work as well for longer posts like Google+ supports.
 By the way, is there a general rule of thumb that folks are using for the
maximum length  a description value should be.

- how would you represent supporting media objects for a creative work?
 For example, a photo that is part of a blog post.  At first glance,
associatedMedia looks like it would be the right property given its name.
 However, the description states that it is a synonym for encodings, which
throws me off a bit.  Personally, I reading encodings as being an alternate
representation of the work (equivalent to a <link rel="alternate">).  It's
exactly the same resource, only with a different encoding.  Based simply on
the name, I read associatedMedia as being roughly equivalent to a <link
rel="enclosure"> or more generic <link rel="related">.  That is, it's a
different resource.

In ActivityStreams, this was why we created the notion of "attachments" to
objects.  At the time, we were trying model the behavior in Google Buzz
(and now still present in Google+) where you have textual note that can
include various media attachments to it.  It's not clear to me if
associatedMedia is analogous to this notion, or if I should be looking
elsewhere?  Am I interpreting associatedMedia and encodings properly?  If
so, are they *really* synonyms?

thanks,
Will