I Hate It When The Headline Says It All

by Brant Watson

One of my biggest pet peeves in media these days are overly descriptive headlines. “Climate Change Is Altering Weather Patterns”, “Your Pet May Be Causing Your Allergies”, “Scientists Discover That Proper Nutrition Is Important For Health”, “Coffee Intake Linked To Alertness”, or any of a myriad of other overly-obvious and descriptive headlines are analogous to a stripper that starts out naked. There is simply nowhere to go from there. The cat is out of the bag.

Worse, many of these articles are actually multiple paragraphs long. They manage stretch the length of their content by introducing only a tiny bit of extra information in each paragraph; information that is certainly supportive, but wholly unnecessary in understanding the larger point. Sometimes they add in a sentence or paragraph that doesn’t even seem to add anything to the larger whole, it just restates the same information in a slightly different way so as to conjure the appearance of additional content.

One really has to wonder about the people that actually read the entire article as well. What on earth prompts them to make it down through the weeds and into the third or fourth paragraphs? These middle paragraphs are usually the worst, where it’s most obvious that the author is likely being paid by the word and the stretching of the content is impossible to miss. The sentences just run on and on until you wonder if the consumers are merely automatons who have been specially designed and conditioned to drive consumption. These paragraphs are often disjointed and the seams in the lack of cohesion are painfully obvious.

Occasionally an article will take a seemingly random tangent down another line of subject that is initially related to the original article only indirectly. Tangents are of course a very useful tool in communication and are frequently the result of free-form conversation, but that doesn’t mean that they are good in every situation. Etymologically, “tangent” has it’s origins in mathematics, referring to a line drawn tangentially from an existing curve or slope (in Latin tangent literally means “touching”). It signals a deviation from the original conversation or subject matter in much the same way. The tangent and original conversation share a common point but extend outwards in unique directions and do not again intersect.

So really in the end, one can probably simply abort such articles early. Better yet, just read the headline. You won’t find anything substantive or new by digging through all the noise, and you’ll save valuable time. It doesn’t take any special skill to spot these articles either. Usually, the headline just says it all.