headlines

Brian Clark said it so many times. The headline can do everything.

Today, as I checked out what’s hot in Digg, I found a disturbing entry on the top 10 in Technology: 10 Most Misspelled Words in Blogs. The writer says that there are ten misused words “in blogs” that cannot be picked up by spellchecking. These ten words are:

1. Your/You’re
2. Then/Than
3. Its/it’s
4. To/two/too
5. Were/where/we’re
6. There/their/they’re
7. A/an/and
8. Off/of
9. Here/Hear
10. Lose/Loose

Hello, is anybody home? Is this an issue specific to the blogosphere? Absolutely not! Seriously, these are 10 most commonly misused words in writing (period). Perhaps, if we wanted to get picky, these are the ten most misspelled words in informal writing (since second-person is not used in formal writing), though there really is no statistical evidence to even support the author’s claims.

So why did this blog get Dugg? Personally, I don’t think the post itself adds any value for me. But obviously, the writer did something right. In the most specific case, the writer used a list post. The “attention-grabbing power” of this particular headline worked because, as Brian says, “Any headline that lists a number of reasons, secrets, types, or ways will work because, once again, it makes a very specific promise of what’s in store for the reader.” Second, adding “in Blogs” to apply these misspellings to something that’s popular today helped attract user’s attention. Apparently, writing about blogs does pretty well in social media.