We all write differently, don’t we?
I Suck At Titles, And That’s OK
…Because your titles suck too
My titles aren’t often specific.
They don’t tell you what number of things you can learn from this other thing. They rarely ask questions. They seldom use buzzwords or ‘power words.’
…In short, I ignore all the excellent advice out there about ‘crafting the perfect headline.’
And I don’t care.
Maybe I should explain a bit —
it’s not that I don’t notice that a lot of my titles are lacking a little; and it’s not that I haven’t tried to improve the sound, the power, the bite of my headlines.
I could lie and say my lack of title prowess has never bothered me, but it has and does.
…But I still don’t care.
(I know that sounds like a paradox, but *shrugs* — there it is!)
My titles suck. But yours do too.
I can’t stand it when people sound like they’re selling things to me.
And you do — many of you, anyway.
You sound like you’re selling something.
When you write thirty titles along the lines of ‘everything I learned about A from B — and you can too!’ what I hear is ‘I threw some sh** together for the $s, enjoy your surface-level nonsense.’
I will point out that I’m not American — so it may be cultural.
It may be that this doesn’t sound sales-like to you, and if so, no problems. You do you.
Or maybe it’s just my thing.
Entirely possible. I’m far from ‘normal’ in most ways.
I don’t blame people who make money from brain-hack, borderline click-bait, titles.
If it works, it works.
But I can’t.
I can’t.
I cannot live with myself and stick titles like ‘The Surprising Thing I Learned From X’ on everything.
If there actually is something surprising that I learned about X then fine. Fit the title to the text, and all that.
But my definition of ‘surprising’ is not ‘something mildly interesting that I probably could’ve worked out before if I had half a working brain-cell.’
…Apologies if I’m sounding harsh.
It’s just that not everyone can or should write titles in the same way.
That’s how we end up with 4 million titles saying ‘6 Dynamite Ways To Increase Your Views— Super-fast!’
Ugh, my head.
Can we have some variety, please?
Can we have something that we actually, genuinely, care about?
If you care about the generic titles with the sales-y pitch, then do not let me stop you. That’s what I’m saying — write what feels right! (A right-write, if you will…)
And even if you write the brightest, shiniest, most SEO-friendly title that has ever been written, someone out there’s going to hate it (probably me.)
…It’s a fact of life. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
We all want different things — we all want to write different things.
And isn’t that magical?
Isn’t it just… proof of the wonderful, whacky, beautiful world we live in?
We need variety — uniqueness— or what would be the point in writing at all?