The Bestest, Greatest Post For Your Day.

Main Points:
1. Headlines are manufactured to draw attention
2. You probably read this post cause of the headline

Did the headline alone make you want to read this post? I am guessing it played a role in why you decided to open this message. Or, you could be really bored and anything with a link on Facebook or Twitter, you read. And, that's OK, I do it too. But, if you did open this because of the post, you may be curious on why you choose to read this post of mine as opposed to an older one.

There are a couple tricks happening in those seven little words I uttered that I will briefly discuss. They are, (1) the use of a superlative, (2) the use of the definite determiner, (3) the use of the 2nd person pronoun and (4) presupposition.

A superlative is the greatest form a word can take and indicates that it is comparatively better than anything it is comparing too. For example, The BESTEST, GREATEST post. By using the word greatest, an adjective that modifies (or attaches) to the noun post, you infer that the post you are about to read is the best, it is better than other posts and therefore you should read it.

The role of a definite determiner is to concisely create definiteness. Definitiveness is a very powerful tool that advertisers use to make you assume the product is constructed just for you. Determiners (like the word the) are words that identify nouns. In this headline, The Bestest, Greatest Post. The first THE modifies the noun POST so that the hearer, you, are positive that the bestest, greatest thing is the post itself. Make sense? The definite determiner is not the only tool advertisers use to make you assume uniqueness, they also use the 2nd person pronoun.

The 2nd person pronoun in my headline is the word you. "In using this pronoun, advertisers conversationally presuppose some knowledge of their audience" (Justice, 57, SDSU). This concept is a little tricky to understand but you need to know that you can say one thing but it can have a different meaning, they call this implied meaning. So for someone to presuppose something, it means that they know something about you. Take for example this headline "Get in touch with YOUR dark side." In this headline, they are presupposing that you ACTUALLY have a dark side. When in fact, they don't know you, they don't even know what you like and don't like. Going back to my headline "The Bestest, Greatest Post For YOUR day." I am presupposing that you read articles daily and this is the one for you.

As we can see in some of the examples I have listed as well as my headline, we subconsciously decide to read things or buy things or engage with a brand based on headlines. They speak to us. But what we have witnessed here, most are manufactured to receive the greatest response.