Since much of our class today was focused on creating headlines that get the point of the story across, I thought I would share one with you that I found particularly confusing. It is from cnn.com, and the headline reads "Girl died as parents prayed". First of all, as we learned today, headlines should contain an active voice, so a better headline would be "Girl dies as parents pray". Secondly, when I read this headline, I immediately thought that the girl died right as her parents were reciting prayers by her deathbed. To me, this was not very newsworthy, and I was curious about it so I clicked on the link. It was actually a link for the video, but the blurb below the video cleared up my confusion. The girl, age 11, suffered from diabetes, and instead of getting medical help for her, her parents chose instead to turn to prayer, hoping that God would cure her of the disease. This resulted in her death, which probably could have been prevented had they chose the medicinal route.
Did you think the same as I when you read the headline? I can think of a few headlines that would better clarify the story and would still be appropriate for an Internet headline. How about "Parents choice of prayer over medicine causes daughter's death"? I think our class alone could think of a much better headline for this story.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
You are absolutely right. The headline went for clever over content. Interestingly, I saw another online headline on the same story after reading your post. It said: Parents pick prayer over Docs: Girl dies
Now that headline is active and gives me a much clearer picture of what happened.
Post a Comment