I’ve been keeping up with the Writer’s Guild strike fairly closely over the last three months, primarily because 1) I’m a writer, though I’m not in the guild, and 2) because I seriously wanted to know when I would get to watch a new episode of “The Office.”
Yay! Finally the strike is over.
That said, I was reminded (ironically) of the value of good writing when I saw this headline on Yahoo today:
Writers end strike; now they must write
That? Is some brilliant headline writing right there. It makes me wonder whether Yahoo! has a template for headlines touting the ends of strikes. Like a headline version of Mad Libs, I imagine it looks like this:
So this is what you might get from Yahoo! headline writers at the close of other strikes:
• Meat packers end strike; now they must pack meat
• Financial planners end strike; now they must plan finances
• Welders end strike; now they must weld
• Slaughterhouse employees end strike; now they must slaughter
• Astronomers end strike; now they must, um…
(It doesn’t work across the board.)