The One Thing We Need to Stop Right Now

Back when we didn’t have Facebook and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I used to receive emails that would include prayers, Bible verses, tear-jerking stories, and general well-wishing-ness. There was nothing inherently wrong with these emails, but inevitably, they usually included a line at the end that said something like, “Email this to ten people within the next ten minutes and ten of your prayers will be answered,” or “if you don’t email this to twenty of your friends, you won’t be blessed and somewhere a puppy will die.” What then ensued was a moment of guilt. What if I don’t forward this? What if God won’t hear my prayers because I deleted this email? What if something terrible happens to me, just because I didn’t send this out to my five hundred closest friends? Fortunately, that moment usually passed quickly, common sense returned, and the email found its way to the trash.

What always bugged me about these emails was the sense of manipulation. There was the underlying message, “If you delete this, you are a horrible person. A spiritual Scrooge. A hard-hearted no-good, rotten-to-the-core delinquent.” It was an appeal to fear—the fear of being bad. Or missing out. Or generally just not doing whatever I was supposed to do.

However, with a little thought, it’s obvious that this sort of manipulation is ridiculous. First of all, it’s a human writing those emails. God’s not up there in heaven dictating to the Archangel Michael, “Okay, now make sure that you put that thing at the end about sending this to ten other people, otherwise we won’t be able to bless anyone today.”

Nor is God checking our email to decide if he’s going to answer our prayers. I don’t think I’ll get to heaven and God’s going to say, “Well, Caitlin, I really wanted to give you what you asked for, but you just would not forward that spam, so you ended up missing out. Now play this harp.”

Nor is he currently thinking, “Too bad she never forwards those emails. I just can’t bless her until she does. Maybe I should resend that and give her a second chance.” If anything, God’s too busy checking his own email to worry about mine.

It seems that these forward-or-die emails are going away (or all my friends figured out that I’m a dead-beat email-blesser). But there’s a rising trend on the internet that reminds me of the days of those manipulative email tag lines. The use of semi-revealing article titles is nearly as manipulative, and I think we should make signs, print t-shirts, and stage a protest.

Or...um…at least not repost these things.

These are articles with titles like, “Her father was angry at her. But then she did this,” or “The One Thing You Need to Know Today,” or “Grab Your Tissues. You Don’t Want to Miss This.”

First of all, I would like to extend my condolences to anyone who has to write a title for anything. It’s rough. I know. My students constantly want to use the name of the assignment as their paper titles to avoid a really thoughtful name.  Often, they don’t want to put a title on there at all. Or they make the title twenty-five point comic sans so that they can write less, meet the page limit, and hope that I don’t notice. But I digress.

Titles need to be wisely chosen. Don’t be so boring that I don’t want to even read the article, but don’t announce everything all at once. Can we also avoid manipulating the reader, making ourselves seem important by insisting we’ve written the ONE thing someone should read, or announcing the intended emotional impact of our writing?

The partial-content-announcement-so-I-make-you-want-to-read-my-sappy-story title is inherently transparent. It’s nothing less than the author jumping up and down saying, “Pick me! Pick me! I have a plot twist!” I suppose that it’s the very eagerness of these sorts of titles that makes me turn up my nose (let’s be honest; I am being pretty snobby here. But I’m an English teacher. And if you’re reading this, you decided to humor my superiority complex. Besides, I just used a semicolon correctly. That alone demands respect).  Seriously though, have some class. If your piece is good, it will get reposted. You don’t have to try to trick me into reading it.

Trickery is also the issue with the whole “One Thing You Need to Read Today” title. First of all, how does anyone know that he has the only piece of information another person needs that particular day? What if the reader also needs to read directions to the hospital, or the instructions on a box of Uncle Ben’s instant white rice, or the thousand and one side effects of that-drug-you-need-but-will-make-the-rest-of-you-feel-worse? Dear people who write these article titles, what if someone reads your article and then doesn’t read that his toothache medicine could also cause fever, diarrhea, heart attacks, strokes, and death—and all because he thinks he read the only thing he needed to when he read your article? We’re talking about people’s lives here. Let’s allow the possibility that there might just be something else that someone needs to read besides an article on Facebook.

Speaking of death and other emotionally difficult things, let’s talk about the “Grab a Tissue” articles—the ones that announce the fact that you’re going to be balling your eyes out by the end. Like many things in life, the key to actually achieving an emotion impact is to not announce, request, or otherwise allude to the fact that one wants to have an emotional impact.

What if JFK had said before beginning his inaugural address, “Guys, I’m going to get you excited about going to the moon and doing cool stuff for your country”?

Or what if Martin Luther King Jr. had said before his “I Have a Dream” speech, “Find a handkerchief, people. This speech is going to make you cry about the possibility of racial equality”?

We all know instinctively that such announcements would be tasteless. They are equally tasteless as article titles. Please don’t tell me that I’m going to cry—because I’m have this weird rebellious streak and am probably going to try really hard not to cry, just to prove you wrong.

So my advice to all would-be article writers is this: follow the literary model. Try a prepositional phrase, like Where the Red Fern Grows or Where the Wild Things Are. Doesn’t that sound much classier? Or go for two nouns and a conjunction, such as Crime and Punishment. Or use a simile, such as “Hills Like White Elephants.” Or if you really need to allude to the fact that you’re telling a story, use the word “tale,” as in A Tale of Two Cities. Hint nicely at the subject matter. Use good vocabulary words. Refrain from trying to manipulate someone into reading your piece. Follow this advice and—with any luck, you—like most great literary writers—will live a life of poverty and anonymity and then be famous well after you’ve died.

So that’s it. That’s the one thing we need to stop right now. Well, that and world hunger, war, poverty, racial injustice, and anything related to the Kardashian family.

And if you don’t send this pretentious and slightly abrasive blog post to ten of your friends or repost it on Facebook, nothing will happen to you because you kept it to yourself. You’ll be fine. I promise.