Unclear Thread Titles (1 Viewer)

[Joseph DeMartino]

Several examples of this turned up in movies recently, including one thread where nobody was sure if the movie being asked about was "Mask" with Cher and Eric Stoltz or "The Mask" with Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz. Rather than take the thread wholly off topic, I thought this might make a thread of its own here in AH:

A lot of threads around here would be much clearer if people used quotation marks around movie and TV series titles in their headers. I can easily understand why some people read the title of one thread in Movies as The "Mask" SE ... did this get cancelled? rather than "The Mask" SE, etc. The ambiguity was inherent in the phrasing. Even without quotation marks The SE of The Mask ... did it get cancelled? would have been clearer. Then there's the thread my eye kept sliding over because I thought it was about a film (or a character, or an actress) named "Laura Fox". The thread was up a couple of days before I read the whole title and realized the originator was talking about "Laura", Fox film noir.... (Another one that could have been saved by word order, creative typography or quotation marks. Laura: Fox film noir..., Fox film noir: Laura... or LAURA Fox film noir...)

Between the under-use of quotation marks, the over-use of intitials ["When is WRERATOUERTOAFJN coming out?") and too generic titles ("Need help", "Have question" and my personal favorite, "Home Theater") there are a lot of nits to pick around here.

Have at it!

Regards,

Joe

 

[Casey Trowbridg]

I really hate vague thread titles. I don't know if a person figures that a thread title like "a question" is more likely to get responses than a thread titled "a question about Friends season 8". I just don't get it and sometimes have joined in great discussions late because I really wasn't sure what the thread was about in the first place.

Oh, and yeah down with abreviations in thread titles.

 

[Kyle McKnight]

Or ones that say too much in a title and nothing in the post, like

Here is the deal,if the Bill Cosby Show is not released,I not buy Cosby Show releases

 

[BrianW]

I know what you mean. What I thought was a discussion about "The Lord of the Rings" turned out to be about Wagnerian opera. I finally got a clue when I realized that Sauron never crossed swords with the Nibelungen.









Too obscure?

 

[Kramer Lowry]

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

And that one loses double points for failure to put spaces after a punctuation mark, another frequent lapse in both titles and message bodies around here, although it happens more often with parentheses that other punctuation marks. (And no, I'm not talking about the odd typo. I'm talking about thread titles like the one above or posts that use a half-dozen sets of parentheses and never set any of them off with a space.)

Punctuation really does matter, and the way something is typed can make it harder or easier to read - and no one who wants to communicate with other people should be so lazy or careless as to make reading what he/she writes more of a chore than it needs to be.

And if you don't believe me about punctuation making a difference, consider these two variations on the same set of words, from the delightful Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss:

"Those old things in the cornder are my ex-husband's."

"Those old things in the corner are my ex-husbands."



Joe

 

[TonyD]

joe thanks for making a thread on this.
matbe the admin will sticky this if it doesnt get ridiculous and stays on topic.

one of my peeves is posting the initials of a name in the title.
better to spell out the whole name then shorten in the post.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Or at least use entire words or abbreviations if you really think the title is too long. "Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles" a bit much? How about "Turtles" or "Ninja Turtles"? Anything but expecting everyone in the world to instantly recognize TMNT at a glance. And when the mistake is compounded by an initial post that also fails to spell out the full title, even once. "80 Days (original)" or "80 Days (remake)" are surely clear enough to indicate that the film in question is "Around the World in Eighty Days", whereas "ATWIED" looks like the cat ran across your keyboard.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Malcolm R]

All the thread titles seem perfectly clear to me.

Are they clouded or blurred for some?

















Oh, did you mean "unclear" in a different sense?

 

[Kramer Lowry]

 

[TonyD]

or how about "The Mask SE OFFICIAL THREAD(jim carrey)"

 

[Patrick Sun]

The quotation marks screw up the search function, so that's why you don't see them in the Official review/discussion thread titles in the Movie area.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I wasn't aware of that. But ALL CAPS seems to work perfectly well, which I guess is why those are used to such good effect in the Official Thread titles.

Regards,

Joe