Writing
Get the Best Readership on Medium
These headlines will grab readers the right way
There is much advice here on Medium on how to create an attention-grabbing headline whether through the magic of power words or piquing curiosity through brevity but I have found a magical commonality threaded through these stories.
If you are looking for the magical formula, skip to the last part of this story where that one simple trick is revealed.
Ok, If you are still reading you are one of us.
Do you care if some ignoramus skips over what took hours to research, write, correct, edit, format, and submit? Hell no you didn’t. When you went to the doctor’s office you didn’t settle for last year’s Field & Stream or Good Housekeeping, so why back off now?
Seriously, would you strike up a conversation with the next table because you overheard talk of American Ninja Warrior or Real Housewives of Atlanta? Probably not, but what if I paid you to take part in that conversation. We’ll call it the Coogan Partner Program. Saunter over and amuse the philistines while they slog through a tray of hot-wings and I’ll toss some loose change your way.
What? You want to negotiate a price? Well, sure everyone has a price. No guarantees but I can tell you about a guy that made some Bitcoin-style bank last summer with listicles.
In all seriousness literacy in the U.S. is far too low. The U.S. Department of Education measures prose literacy, e.g. news stories and instructional materials, as well as document and quantitative literacy. The latter are related to reading forms, maps, food labels, and parsing math from text.
54% of the U.S. population has prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
We do have to account for non-native English speakers in this 54%, even so, two-thirds were born in the United States and a full third are white U.S.-born adults. That is about one-fifth of all Americans that should stop wasting the gift of Reading Rainbow.
Shall we cater to this audience? I say nay, throw down a gauntlet and challenge your audience with headlines that will attract the right kind of reader.
Let Me Tell You About the Rabbits Lenny
Leaving a relationship peacefully
Praise Be Dating
How to catch a Commander and not get hung on The Wall
Medium Short Form: Capricious or Minimalist?
How to prevent palaverous prose.
The Quixotic Criticisms of Wind Energy
Braggadocios and blowhards tilt at climate change
Write Doubleplusgood in 30 Days
Enlisting big brother as your editor
The Tralfamadorian Day Planner
Get more done by ignoring the sequence of time
The M & M Enterprises Business Plan
There’s a catch but the IRS won’t find it
How To Be Sesquipedalian Without Being Supercilious
Nobody likes a grandiloquent grammatician
For readers who have borne this journey with me, feel free to use any of these headlines as fodder, and be sure to skip the next section.
The one simple trick
- Go to your nearest public library.
- Find the librarian (usually they are behind a desk of some sort or putting away books.
- Ask for “Good literature”.
- Read it.
- Repeat.