Internet news stories have developed a lamentable tendency to insult the reader with presumed headlines accusing the reader of assumed faults, like: “You’re using that dash wrong”, etc. (The aforementioned is simply the most recent example I’ve seen of this apparently growing trend of arrogance in headline writing.) Why do these writers feel they are omniscient, and that everyone but them is doing everything incorrectly, or else is completely ignorant of the things they’re writing about, such as movie articles with headlines like: “You’ve never seen these scary movies”? And even if everyone were wrong and/or ignorant, the sense that the writer is snootily looking down their nose to deign to correct the unwashed masses with their unbounded wisdom is a bit off-putting, at least in the way they’re constructing this type of headline. Maybe they’re right about some of their readers, but for the others, they just seem like assholes. So how about this instead: for the headline: “You’re using that dash wrong”, why not instead try: “You may be using that dash incorrectly”, or: “How to use that dash grammatically correctly”? Then the story may interest, rather than insult, the reader. See what I mean? But don’t do it because it’s nice, do it so people don’t start writing articles with headlines like: “Your headline makes you seem like an arrogant P.O.S. know-it-all”, and: “Why headlines all suck these days”.
Here’s the article about how you’re using the dash wrong because apparently, according to this headline writer, you suck, and you’re not really even worth correcting, but they have to pay the rent, so, like, whatever…:
Amusingly, as people pointed out in the comments section to this article, the author made a little error in stating that the dash key is to the left of the 0 key (it’s to the right). Maybe they need to read an article called: “Why you need to proofread your articles if you’re going to act like a know-it-all”. (I’ll bet I’ll have typos galore after writing this bit about how they ought to proofread their pieces. It works every time…)
Oh, and by the way, how come my word processor program can’t figure out which dash to use for me? It acts like it knows everything else about my writing, what with placing all those green squiggly lines under stuff – much of which is actually grammatically correct – although admittedly it’s not very good at that. (Did I use it right? Huh? Did I use it right?)
