Everywhere you look these days you are bombarded with headlines that promise 7 ways to improve sex life or 28 sites that will change your life or 76 ways to stop going insane from reading articles with titles with numbers in them. That and articles with bullet pointed lists.
I thought headlines like these died circa 1960 when Bill Bernbach revolutionised advertising with intelligence and wit. But no. Someone who was not on the memo sent by all the great ads from Bernbach, Abbot and the like crawled out of a stone, found a keyboard and just continued from where they left off. If it were up to these guys, they would rewrite (using write loosely here) the classic Lemon ad with "3389 reason why a VW is better" because that's the number of inspectors checking each VW. Or worse. I don't know when it will stop, but it's spreading like a cliche.It is as worrying as the spread of SMS lingo (omg!).
Close on its heels are the bullet points (bullets don't kill good copy, people do). While bullet points have their place in copy, they shouldn't be the only way to express one's point of view. It's just plain lazy or incompetence. But that's dictated by the headline, which, these days is all about '15 ways to something' or '27 ways to not do something'. With the proliferation of online material on every topic, and given the short-attention span of the audience, it is a genuine worry.
But you do see decent pieces sprinkled across the web, dodging the bullets so to speak, which give you hope that there is still hope for well-written articles.
I thought headlines like these died circa 1960 when Bill Bernbach revolutionised advertising with intelligence and wit. But no. Someone who was not on the memo sent by all the great ads from Bernbach, Abbot and the like crawled out of a stone, found a keyboard and just continued from where they left off. If it were up to these guys, they would rewrite (using write loosely here) the classic Lemon ad with "3389 reason why a VW is better" because that's the number of inspectors checking each VW. Or worse. I don't know when it will stop, but it's spreading like a cliche.It is as worrying as the spread of SMS lingo (omg!).
Close on its heels are the bullet points (bullets don't kill good copy, people do). While bullet points have their place in copy, they shouldn't be the only way to express one's point of view. It's just plain lazy or incompetence. But that's dictated by the headline, which, these days is all about '15 ways to something' or '27 ways to not do something'. With the proliferation of online material on every topic, and given the short-attention span of the audience, it is a genuine worry.
But you do see decent pieces sprinkled across the web, dodging the bullets so to speak, which give you hope that there is still hope for well-written articles.
RSS Feed
