I didn’t think an article about grammar would make me laugh so hard. But after opening a link my writer friend Lori posted to Facebook, a 2012 Harvard Business Review article by Kyle Wiens, I let out a huge giggle.
Why I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poo
Use poo for what? As a writing instrument (a.k.a finger paint)? As a weapon? Or take it for granted, like a fair-weathered friend. As in, you just use Poo, but you don’t care about him.
The actual headline of the article is “Why I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.” But because the publishing platform that runs HBR’s website apparently creates (or did create) URLs from the the first x-amount of characters in the page tile (which usually doubles as the article headline), we get “poo.”
I can’t explain the technical side of this too eloquently (or at all) because I don’t know what the program is or the, perhaps very logical, reasoning behind the cut-off point within that string of letters and hyphens, but I have some thoughts about how it looks to the end user.
This post is not meant to pick on HBR. But this example was too good not to write a blog post about! I did scan through its blog and noticed that recent posts do have the full titles in the URL, so the publication definitely improved since the post in question went live. However, to make sure this HBR instance was not just a one-time thing, I ventured back as far as 2006 and in all the older articles I spot-checked had permalinks cut off at random spots.
Had any other word been cut off I don’t think I would have been fazed, at least not to the point I’d be compelled to write about it. But it was poo. So here goes.
Why does the URL matter?
Well, first of all, it can send the wrong message. It’s unfortunate I discovered this on an article ABOUT details, but I doubt it was this writer’s fault his headline got lobbed off, thus giving his article a whole new meaning. While most eyes aren’t immediately drawn to the URL in the address bar, some do see that first, before taking notice of the actual headline. HBR isn’t really where I’d look for articles about employees with alternate uses for feces. I mean, most everyone finds the occasional scatological humor funny [hence the popularity of this], but it can be kind of hard to take seriously a story from a reputable company–in this case from a respected publication of a prestigious institution–that would allow a headline like that.
Second, because many people do not know how to or don’t spend time to make text linkable within an email or document* people often paste the whole URL instead into a paper, memo, proposal, press release and email. I admit that I do too sometimes in a hurry. Just because something is underlined in blue doesn’t mean people won’t read it before clicking. While including a long URL in a print or electronic is a pet peeve of mine, I know people will do it, so don’t use a URL that might divert attention from the message, any further than it already is from your insanely long blue line. (Favor: If you ARE adding the URL to a document you only plan to use in hard copy, please remove the hyperlink that Word annoyingly automatically adds when you type a web address; people can’t click on paper so no need to keep it blue. Your document will look nicer, too!)
Third, going along the lines of my second point about using the whole web address in a document, let’s not forget that people still print web pages. Myself included. (Usually they end up in the recycling bin because it’s not a print-friendly page, but that’s another story!) But the web address appears on those pages as the source, usually at the bottom of the page. [edited to add: see bottom; someone actually did this with the article I referenced!]
There are many other reasons a URL matters (SEO, for one!), but those aren’t as relevant to the points I’m making about how they visually appear to a user.
Shortening URLs isn’t bad. Don’t want anyone to think that’s my gripe.
At work, I’m a member of the (unofficial) short URL police force. I mark up postcard, booklet and brochure proofs all the time with comments like, “Yeah right. No one will ever type that into their address bar.” You can sense my anger; really all I need to say, as a proofer, is, “replace with short URL.” But I add commentary. Because I can’t help it. Especially if there are question marks and equal signs and dot-a-s-p-x-dot.coms! An easy-to-remember short URL is crucial for print piece calls to action! But a systematic cut-off-in-the-middle-with-no-rhyme-or-reason short(er) URL doesn’t mean the same thing. That’s shortening it into something that could be indecipherable.
Services like bit.ly allow us to shorten links because super-long links not only look atrocious when “spelled out” but moreso because it makes for easier sharing. For example: not taking up important real estate when there happens to be limited character space, like in a tweet. Twitter now even automatically shortens URLs included in tweets; however, while they appear truncated to the viewer (seemingly cut off), the links indeed still work. When you go to the website, though, you will see the actual URL in the address bar. So you would see: “Why I Won’t Hire Employees Who Use Poo” even if the short URL is bit.ly-something or abbreviated by Twitter.
I guess what I am saying here is this: be mindful of the character count limit in your web or blogging platform’s user structure so you will know if your headline is going to get cut off at an unfortunate place.
This happens in social media too. Know your limits.
As I am writing this, I am reminded of an example I used in my social media mistakes session, “Phonies, Faux Pas and Fakes: How to Deal With Social Media Spoofs, Goofs and Snafus” (presented at HighEdWeb in October 2013 and at The Web Conference at Penn State in June 2014). This illustration was taken from two screen shots a fellow higher ed web social person shared of an insanely funny-yet-unfortunate oopsie on a student-run social media account at his college. (He added the blur for a reason so out of respect I won’t say what school this was!) This example, shown below in the form of one of my slides, clearly illustrates the danger of using an app to automatically send your Facebook posts to your Twitter account. First of all, that’s lazy. Second of all, each social media platform caters to a different audience and different types of users (of course there is some overlap) so content should not be exactly the same. Not final reason (I could go on!), but third and worst of all, this can happen:
The first one is the shortened Tweet; after you gasp, read the second post, the complete message.
A screen capture of my slide from my social media spoofs, goofs and snafus session.
Yup. What a student posted enthusiastically on Facebook was lost in translation on the student group’s Twitter audience; they got something something with a completely different meaning, something some might consider lewd. What the student leader of this hockey club intended to do was invite people to an event, to say, “If you’re bored, get off campus …” But because he didn’t pay attention to where the message would cut off, he told his bored followers to get off.
See, Facebook accepts what seems like an unlimited amount of characters (it used to have a cap in the 400 range), while Twitter only allows 140. Think about it. If you auto-send your stuff from Facebook to Twitter, your message is going to stop somewhere. While this specific example is hilarious on one level, it also shows that, no matter what we do on the web, we need to pay attention. Control the message.
If we’re using these mediums to represent an organization, we can’t take short cuts like this. Why? We might accidentally tell our audience to eff off.
An Addendum
I was curious. After I wrote this, I wondered what would happen if I Googled “I won’t hire people who use poo.” Would the Wiens article appear at or close to the top? I found a few mentions of it, but mostly in comment sections of other grammar articles.
In the comments section of one blog post, a person linked to Wiens’s article, adding that it was a succinct source of grammar advice, but then, almost stream-of-consciousness-ly, he or she added, “As I’m writing this the link I pasted in reads ‘I won’t hire people who use poo’? Now that’s a solid argument in itself but It’s not the point of the article.”
And I had to laugh when I saw this “meme,” which illustrates my print point way better than I did:
What is the funniest or most offensive accidental cut-off title you’ve seen online? Share below!
*Hint: when using Word, copy URL from source, go back to your document, highlight the word or phrase you wish to make a link**, hit Control-K (command-K on Mac), paste in the URL into the box that appears, click OK. Voila! (You can also right right click to see URL options too.)
**This phrase should not be “click here.” You’ll break everything. (OK. I kid about the breaking, but “click here” has become dated.)
Note: I might have used URL and permalinks interchangeably here; I think they technically are separate things.)