I was having an email discussion with some people I work with. It was about an article that is really interesting, but based on sketchy science. And one of the people wrote, “Don’t forget Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.” The law is a little obscure. The basic idea is that any article that asks a yes or no question can be answered in the negative. Consider, for example, the headline of this article.

It may not be clear why this matters, so let me explain. Imagine that you want to publish an article that is really thin. Maybe some study just came out that found a negative correlation between drinking Pepsi and getting colon cancer. Well, it’s just one study. There will probably be a dozen more that will show no effect or a positive correlation. So you write the article and publish it with the headline, “Is Pepsi a Cure for Colon Cancer?”

See the trick? You’re not saying that Pepsi stops colon cancer; you’re just asking questions. As Donald Trump might put it, “We just want to find out what’s going on.” It’s a bit sleazy. But more important, it isn’t honest. This is quite different from asking a question in a headline and then answering it in the article.

History of Betteridge’s Law

The concept got its name starting back in 2009. Erick Schonfeld wrote an article for TechCrunch, Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA? The story took off — and not in a good way. It didn’t seem to be true. Ian Betteridge responded to the article at TechNovia, TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism. He ended the article:

The Broader View

Of course, the concept wasn’t original to Betteridge. It’s part of a broader discussion of “weasel words.” These are things that non-fiction writers — journalists especially — talk about a lot. For example, I can write, “It seems that there is information that some people believe proves Donald Trump enjoys getting golden showers from Vladimir Putin.” If you notice the “seems” and “some people believe,” you will see that what I’ve actually said is that I don’t know a damned thing.

Should You End Headlines With Question Marks?

But since I don’t want to fall afoul of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, I am going to answer my question. Are Headlines That End in a Question Mark a Good Idea? Yes! People like them. They click on them. But they are like all headlines: they raise ethical issues. I think the writer should answer the question they ask. Otherwise, they shouldn’t ask a question. TechCrunch shouldn’t have gone with, “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” It should have gone with something like, “Rumor Spreading That Last.fm Shares User Data With RIAA.” But even that would be misleading because it was mostly that one TechCrunch article that spread the rumor. More accurate would be, “Exclusive: A Rumor I Heard That Last.fm Shares User Data With RIAA.”

The sad thing is, of course, that ethics be damned. TechNovia doesn’t seem to even exist anymore. TechCrunch is one of the biggest tech websites in the world. According to Alexa, it is the 550th most visited website overall. Of course, it is a great website. But I have little doubt that they made a huge amount of money off that non-great article, even though they were widely criticized for it.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is most useful for writers and editors to think about before publishing. If a question headline seems perfect for the article, maybe the article isn’t worth publishing — at least not yet.

I am one of the easiest and yet hardest people to give gifts to. On one hand I love books so you would think, “Easy, I will just get her a book.” Then you realise you have no idea what books I happen to have. Even having a wish list on Amazon doesn’t help as one friend somehow managed to pick the ones I had no interest in reading but had to put on there to placate other friends.

But I am easy to shop for since getting me gift cards to Barnes and Noble always works. So this holiday season, I got book spending money from a couple of people and went digging around for good books to get and now will tell you all about them.

Sex and Politics

My first books was, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power.

When it comes to powerful women there have been few more powerful than Elizabeth I. (That’s real power and not simply puppetry power like say Queen Victoria after the reforms from the Glorious Revolution continued unabated to now the British monarch runs the military and not much else). The Russians topped her with the German Catherine the Great. (She stole her crown from her husband. Then again, he was incompetent.) And possibly you could consider Tsu-Hsi or Mbande Nzinga.

Fine British Cuisine

Next up is, Seven Centuries of English Cooking: A Collection of Recipes.

This one hasn’t arrived yet but I will experiment with one of the recipes and tell you how fast my kitchen exploded from goodness.

Blood Good Battle

My third books was, Fatal Colors: Towton 1461 England’s Most Brutal Battle.

This was a battle that decided a war, killed a lot of men and took place during a raging blizzard. It is also one of the battles that led to some amazing archeology that you can watch on YouTube.

When you are living through history — like we are — it is helpful to go back to other times where history was being made and see how people reacted to it and what the ordinary had to deal with when it came to the extraordinary. The men and women who dealt with the tumult of a civil war that led to peace and prosperity for most of the time that Edward IV reigned (1461 to 1470 and 1471 to 1483) had to deal with the taxes, the loss of family members, and the social upheaval that war always brings. Some were able to and others were not.

Teen Fiction

The next book was perhaps an odd choice, Forever Again.

One of my favorite authors wrote a teenage book that has a lot more adult elements and a very good twist for the ending. [Bruce Willis is actually dead. -FM] I recommend it because it takes little time to read (I finished it in about four hours) and it reminds me of how different our world is from the late eighties.

Discworld

My fifth book was, The Wee Free Men.

Terry Pratchett’s death left a huge hole in the world of gentle satire. He also was able to blend different lessons into one book again and again without it seeming dated. On one hand, this book is about a bunch of little blue men with violent red hair. On the other it is a book about the importance of family and defending them from those who wish them harm — even if the harm is in the form of sticky sweeties. It is further about learning who you are and who you can become.

MST3K

And last on this sort list is, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever.

I followFrank Conniff on Twitter and he is great. He’s always willing to bash a troll in the most droll way possible. But this book has been kind of a dud so far. Maybe you will like it more.

And those are just a few of the books I got with my Christmas loot. I mean gifts.

Oh, Joomla! For those who don’t know, Joomla! is the second most popular content management system (CMS) on the internet — a distant second to WordPress, which is what we use here at Frankly Curious. But it causes constant problems for me in my professional work, because I have to deal with sentences like this, “The three most popular CMSs are WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.” You will probably see the problem: I hate following an exclamation mark with a comma.

But the word doesn’t have to have an exclamation mark. It could be a period, for example. Suppose some idiot marketing guru decided that a new company should be called Stop. — with the period as part of the name. Imagine that! “The three more stupid recent company names are Pause,, Stop., and What?” The one thing you can say about that is at lease “Pause,” and “Stop.” are clear. But they are only clear because they aren’t at the end of the sentence. Okay, “Pause,” would be clear: “The three more stupid recent company names are What?, Stop., and Pause,.”

Minor Problems Still Need Solving

These are the things that I think about. A lot. These are also the kinds of things that make people create (or at least use) style guides. Unfortunately, having come up in the book publishing business, I’ve only had The Chicago Manual of Style around for decades. It’s only in the last year or so that I bought The Associated Press Stylebook. But it doesn’t matter. I cannot find the issue addressed in either book.

Sure, it’s a minor issue. It doesn’t come up that much — even for me. But for months, I’ve been bouncing around, looking for a good solution. There isn’t one as far as I can tell. In the original sentence above, I could just say that the serial comma is not necessary when the next to last item ends with a punctuation mark, “The three most popular CMSs are WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But that doesn’t solve the general problem. And it gives me one more special case to remember. Also: it looks terrible.

Potential Solution

What is to be done? I’ve looked around, and the consensus seems to be, “Whatever feels right at the time.” The most common cudgel is to use the exclamation point when it is convenient and not use it when it isn’t. I don’t like this — although I’ll admit that I’ve used it a lot. A better solution would be just to decide that the people who named Joomla! are stupid and that the name is simply “Joomla.” Intellectually, I like this solution very much.

Emotionally, I hate it. These nitwits decided that the name of their product is “Joomla!” Shouldn’t I respect that? Would I like it if people started calling me “George”? Admittedly, I would be innocent in this regard. There’s no reason to call me “George”; I don’t go around calling myself “Frank#@!”! And there is a very good reason for not calling me Fran: Fran Moraes.

Joomla It Is!

So I’ve decided something for this case alone. Hang on a second and I will put it in my style book… Okay, it’s done: “Joomla!” is now “Joomla.” The funny thing is that before I dictated that it always be “Joomla!” But really: could anyone be confused? “Joomla? What is this Joomla? I’ve heard of Joomla!, but never Joomla. I wonder what it could be?!” No one would be thusly confused.

Now I understand: I am effectively giving all the Joomla developers the middle finger. But I really don’t care. If their name was something common like “wow,” then I could see it. But Joomla is the English equivalent of the Swahili word “jumla,” which means “wholesale” as in “total.” It doesn’t need the exclamation mark. It isn’t a word that is in any English language dictionary.

Beyond This Case

But I am bothered by the larger issue. For example, as far as I know, Orson Welles wanted the name of his film F for Fake to be ?. See the problem? But you probably don’t need to worry about such things. Even most editors don’t worry about such things. And if Kurt Gödel taught us that algebra was ultimately inconsistent, how could we hope for English to be so? But I’ll continue to lie awake thinking about these matters. At least I have “Joomla” dealt with.

The next time someone asks me why I use WordPress, I have a great response, “Because there is no punctuation in its name.” It certainly isn’t because it’s a bad CMS. It is, in fact, a great CMS. I still need to come up with a reason for not using Drupal. Maybe, “It’s spelled wrong”?

Last night was my big Don Quixote talk. I published my planned talk yesterday, Tonight’s Don Quixote Talk. And so, I found myself at the local Whole Foods conference room with nine other book nuts to talk about arguably my favorite book (but undoubtedly the book I know most about). Because I hadn’t prepared an actual lecture, I printed out my “lecture notes,” along with the other articles I had referenced in it. I prepared ten copies, which was perfect, given that nine people showed up, and I needed one myself. This helped to open things up. I’ve long known that reading was a spiritual experience, but talking about it?

We spent two hours discussing Don Quixote, and it really was a spiritual experience. As I told them, although I have a faithful online audience, I can depend upon them to ignore pretty much everything I write about this great book. And I can hardly blame you all. Just the same, it was so nice to be with people who had read the first Don Quixote and who were genuinely interested in it.

The Best-Laid Plans of Book Talks…

The talk did not go as expected. In particular, we got caught up in the question of Don Quixote being the first modern novel. I had included this in my notes only because it is such a common statement that I figured I needed to touch on it. Indeed, my main point about it was, “Unless you are an academic, I think this is a terrible reason for reading it.” But it really did become an issue that we had a hard time getting past.

It was a very edifying, spiritual experience for me, because I’ve never thought about the question much. The main reason that Don Quixote is “modern” is because it makes the human character the most important element. For the first time in literature, ordinary humans become the subject of our stories. And they turn out to be far more interesting than gods and heroes and all the rest. And Cervantes bursts out of the gate with two of the most splendid misfits to ever decorate a sheet of paper.

Don Quixote Begins

But the people in this readers’ group were not inclined to just accept simple answers. For one thing, they wanted to know if it really was all that sudden. And I had to admit that it wasn’t. I knew, for example, that the theater of the few generations before Cervantes had been undergoing a transformation. Plays had always been moral lessons with characters simply representations of concepts. It was only during the middle of the 16th century that this began to change. And this is what led to the vibrant theater around the turn of the early 17th century in England, Spain, and elsewhere.

But a play is limited in what it can do with character. And Cervantes, having wanted to be a playwright from his earliest years, knew the theater well. So there is a special confluence: the trends in theater and Cervantes’ generally poor skills in writing for it. What a fabulous and original way of looking at the creation of Don Quixote.

We also talked about literature after Cervantes. We now know that Don Quixote was extremely important to the evolution of the novel. But how did that happen? It wasn’t the case that everyone suddenly started writing like Cervantes. We started talking about books that we know, but the truth is that among this very well-read group, few knew much of the literature of the 17th and 18th century. The only book I could think of was The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling — almost a century and a half later. Someone else mentioned Daniel Defoe. But it still makes me very interested to know just what was happening for that first century after Don Quixote became a worldwide sensation.

A Spiritual Experience

It’s such a wonderful thing to discuss arcane subjects with other people who will engage in them. And the diversity was stunning. Some people were really grappling with the questions — hoping that I had the answers. Others were more skeptical of some of my more glib remarks. By the end of this two hours of discussion, I had two somewhat paradoxical thoughts. The first was that I understand Don Quixote at a fairly deep level. The second was that there are whole new ways of thinking about the novels that people who have only just read it reveal. It was an extremely edifying experience for me.

And from a social standpoint it was so hopeful. Here was a group of ten people who braved the cold and the rain to meet up to discuss a couple of books written over 400 years ago. It was like going to church — having a spiritual experience. Yes, the world is filled with problems and there are evil people who seem determined to make things worse just to aggrandize their already overfull egos and lifestyles. But we can let them live their hollow lives. We readers are the monks of our civilization — pursuing truth and beauty simply because it is there to be pursued. I’m so grateful to these people. I think there is hope for humanity after all.

Not long ago, a client asked me to write a newsletter about something ghastly. It is the kind of work that I think of when I tell people that I’m a whore — that I’ll do anything for money. The client, who is a good writer himself (at least when it comes this this kind of soul-crushing, ad-copy, the only thing that matters is making a buck, writing). So when he got my final version, he changed it quite a lot. But given that he’s actually a nice guy, he apologized for it.

It wasn’t necessary. I’ve been writing professionally for coming up on 30 years. And there are a few things I’ve learned. One is that writing like this is about making money, not expressing myself. Another is that writing is a collaborative enterprise. Think of Finnegans Wake and Naked Lunch. Now you might think those were written by Joyce and Burroughs, but they were not. They were group efforts, that make quite a bit more sense because they weren’t left solely in the hands of their supposed authors.

Writing Is a Team Effort

I told my client that there was no reason to apologize. I understood that I was part of a team. And frankly, I did the hardest part: writing the first official version. It’s so much easier to take someone’s writing and improve it than it is to stare at a blank screen and come up with something new to say. But I understand why he apologized. Many writers would incorrectly think that what they wrote was thrown out and the whole thing was written from scratch. That almost never happens.

Writers too often think that they have a mean editor — people who take joy in destroying their great works of art. But editors are a writer’s best friend. Do a little experiment. Find a writer you really like. Then find them published in magazines and websites where you don’t normally read them. You will likely find that they seem rather different — in some cases like a completely different writer. This is the effect of a good editor.

The Real “Mean Editor”

There is a real mean editor. In my professional work, I just don’t have the time to be one. But I’ve been one in the past. I’m even one from time to time here at Frankly Curious. Such a mean editor really doesn’t care what the writer wrote — or even what the writer intended to write. What the writer created is used only create something that the editor feels they can use.

I ran into this some 15 years ago when a writer gave me an article for a popular website I was running. The article was totally unacceptable for the website. It was too simple for the audience. So I savaged it — totally rewrote it so that it was in a form where it fit. The writer was, to put it mildly, displeased. He demanded that I take it down. I understand now, but then I was flummoxed. I thought I had done him a major favor.

But now I think I was a mean editor. This was not, after all, a professional writer. And I was not paying. Just the same, I was offering him a huge audience that he could never have gotten otherwise. But I should have just sent the article back and explained why the article would not work and what I needed. Just the same, he did end up with an article that was far superior to what he wrote and he would have received a byline for what was mostly my work.

Helping Writers — Even When It Hurts

When dealing with professional writers, it’s much easier. No one pays for work that they can’t use. So if something is unacceptable, I just send it back. This is kind of mean, but writers seem never to see it that way. Sadly, “professional” writers don’t usually do much of a better job on their second try than they do their first. And that’s usually where I stop. I make a note that this is not a writer worth using in the future. And even if I have to make substantial changes to the work, few of these writers will think me a mean editor — because they can’t be bothered to read what gets published.

I do understand why my client apologized to me. At the same time, it was slightly offensive. He showed that he didn’t understand that I was a good and experienced a writer. I suppose he doesn’t want to be seen as a mean editor. And in a sense, he is. He could have sent it back to me and asked that I write it more in his style. But I now know his style and shouldn’t require much editing in the future.

But the truth is that all writers need a mean editor. The best editors help writers to develop their own mean editors — internal voices that tell them, “This sucks; let’s savage it; let’s start all over.” Otherwise, you’ll never be much more than a mediocre writer.

The mean editor: destroyer of the medicore writer.