TITLE You Cringe, You Win

Dear Inquiry,

Titles seem like a good idea at first mental glance.

Right? Okay? Because the point of a title is to give the article in capsulized form. Let's see what we have today:

But then I wonder about their prejudicing powers – especially in the direction of the rejection, i.e. “No point reading this because ”.

“Don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle” — Elmer Wheeler, sometime in the 1950s.

(What got me thinking about titles again wasn't any of that, though, but that I was starting to post with similar to same verbiage for a while there, and didn't want to find out the hard way the URL naming algorithm was going to be overwriting past posts because newer posts opened in ways leading to identical URLs.)

(Like it really matters if these get overwritten, right?)

You're overthinking, bud.

So my own personal title naming algo — and maybe this can be your own personal naming algo, I don't know — is I write my ditty first with its draft dummy working title. Currently the working title is “A Title By Any Other Name”. I don't really know the title until a piece is finished, because the nature of the piece will change a title a couple times, even after a piece is published and comments have skewed and sized it a bit more.

For personal pieces I'll pull a few of the weirdest purple elephants (to hock a Seth Godin term) out of the piece's text to give some “sizzle” to give the reader some context or “memory anchors”. A couple pieces ago I used Mae West and Violets, because in some paragraphs I used both words at least once. Words you use once are good anchors because they're outliers, they're words that are statistically used less than 3% in common parlance. (I made that number up. It's probably closer to .3%) They're also very sensory — the audience can picture them. Sensory words are hypnotic. As many sensory words as you can stuff into a sentence or a title are GOOD.

BAADDDD BAD BAD BIGGEDY BRRRR Baaaa baaa BLACK SHEEEP BAAAD words would be stuffs that an audience can't see/hear/feel/taste/see/hear/feel/taste. Because those are the conversations impossible to PERCEIVE. Therefore can't make visceral-ganglial CONNECTION in their gut-mind. You cringe, you win. “It” is a fantastic example. It is the worst example of a word, ever. And Ever. “It is the worst example of a word ever” is a fantastic example of the worst example of a sentence, because there are no sensory touchstones in this sentence. “It is the worst example of a word ever” is an amorphous, abstract, floating blob concept, hooked to nothing.... a plastic bag posing as a jellyfish floating in a softly lit ocean of numb thought... waiting for the right turtle to gulp it up and kill it slowly....

And this irks me to rename the article “It is the worst example of a word, ever”... but that would be crass.

Let's scissor the rest of this conversation back to where we were so we can snip it back into shape.

I see where you don't want to title anything because you don't want to give away too many free samples for fear of someone not wanting to pay for the Real Thang. But let's shake away from your Costco mentality where “grazing” is a sport and move to “flight” testing at wineries where samples are PAID. Titles are a curated taste and THAT's the mentality you should bring to your shit. Unless it's just one of those groggy ass days where you don't went to wear pants. Then don't title your shit.

#Neverlookbackspace