List of Media

As publications compete for clicks on social media, far too many are congregating around the hackneyed way of writing tweets and headlines that relies heavily on over-promising - "You'll never guess" (you probably could), "You won't believe" (you almost certainly will), "the best thing you'll read today" (it won't be, I promise) - and under-delivering - "what happened next will blow your mind" (it never does).

Once upon a time, simply not following a handful of publications was a guaranteed way to avoid such clickbait but now everybody seems to be at it (though there are some who manage to do it wrong as this effort from the Express shows):

"Is it The Shawshank Redemption?"

Speaking of doing it wrong, the crafting of such clickbait headlines and tweets tends to rely on a lot of assumptions about what we might already know, think, believe or even care about, such as"This video will change the way you think about cats...". Or they go so far as to tell us we've been doing something utterly mundane wrong our entire lives in the hope our nagging self-doubt and inherent insecurity about the way we peel an orange will be enough to make us click on a link:

The word "this" has a key role to play in the clickbait lexicon. "This" is the shrugging, indifferent teenager of the English language, a word so opposed to being helpful it can turn almost any informative headline into lazy clickbait by simply swapping it in for the subject of the sentence. It has become shorthand for something or somebody you didn't know, or may not care about if you did, used to disguise the often unspectacular truth of a story just long enough to make us click.

"this actor [who you've never heard of]..."

"Remember when [thing you won't ever care about] happened..."

"Can you believe [thing that's crushingly dull] just happened..."

It's Barbados by the way.

In between, we are invariably asked "Is this the funniest...", "the best..." or "the weirdest..." and everything seems to be "adorable", "funny" a "prank" or we're told it is "going viral" (in the hope it might).

* ...as long as it's the only Scottish football Vine you'll ever seen.

Let me just check my list of "most confused things Cheryl Cole has ever said". Where is it? I'm sure I put it down here somewhere...

So taking an initiative from the Independent's John Rentoul and his banned list of words and phrases which have no place in good writing, I have started a 'Clickbait banned list'. If you're using one of the below then stop and ask yourself why. If it's because you want to over-promise and under-deliver, thus eroding the trust and respect of your readers, while insulting their intelligence and ensuring you become indistinguishable from everybody else overusing these lazy constructs, then carry on. But if that's not actually your long term goal then it's probably not too late to change.