Looking at the title of this blog post, I may have lead some of you astray. If this post was really the “best” then I wouldn’t have titled it in a questioning manner. Rather, I would have come out confidently and titled this post “The Best Blog Post Ever”. The fact that I wasn’t too sure about how good my post was, indicates that the answer to the questioning headline is most likely no. This is in accordance with Betteridge’s law of headlines, which states that; any headline, which ends in a question mark, can be answered by the word no.
This is also known as Davis’ law. Essentially if a journalist did not have any substantial reasoning to be able to back up a claim they wanted to make, then, through a question mark they can protect their credibility while stirring up some interest. Often these stories are the byproducts of sensationalism in which the writer poses a question, that many people would want to know the answer to, as the headline to the story. This results in a very average article being over-read. Ian Betteridge, uses the following example to make his point.
“Have we found a cure to Cancer?” – The answer is probably no, because if a cure was actually found, “We found the cure to Cancer!” is a much better headline and would have been used instead. I would hypothesize that any objective articles (the article leading itself to a final yes/no answer) that end in a question mark can be answered with a no.
So the next time you guys come across an article of the sort, test and apply this law and see how effective it is. It could save you time from reading, frankly, pointless articles.
