I Won't Tell You What This Post is About (Ep. 16)
Are you still reading? Or have you gone away already?
You're in a bookshop. You're browsing to find a novel to read. How do you proceed?
You'll probably look at the covers of the forward-facing books first and pick the ones you like. You may then read the blurb, which gives you a vague idea of what to expect from the story. But you already know it's like the advert telling you this frozen pizza tastes like the one you get straight out of a wood-fired oven in Naples. You may open the book and read the opening paragraph or two.
But you don't do any of this when picking a technical book or article to read. And a look at my bookshelves with technical books confirms this—the book covers are largely meh! (One programming book has a picture of a rat on the cover. What the…?) Except The Python Coding Book, of course, which looks great, and you ought to frame it and hang it over the fireplace.
Book and article titles • And the rules for choosing titles for technical books and articles differ from picking the name for your bestselling novel. Most people will only read the book or article if it's about a topic they want to learn. Normally, this means the title should make this clear.
This poses a problem for the more narrative style of technical articles. And as you know, this is my manifesto (how I dislike that word) for more storytelling and narration in technical writing. If the article has a strong element of storytelling, an old-fashioned technical title may jar.
Often, my solution is to use a two-part title. As an example, I picked a couple of articles from my other substack, The Python Coding Stack. One is called "The Curious Little Shop at The End of My Street • Python's f-strings" and another "The Strange Practices at The Broadcaster's Inn • Broadcasting in NumPy". Even if you're not au fait with Python, you'd have figured out that the first part of each title is the title of the story and the second part is the conventional mention of the technical topic.
Stealth Teaching • Apologies. I've taken a long-winded route to get to the main point of this post. I'm planning an experiment with one of my upcoming articles on The Python Coding Stack: Stealth teaching. Let me explain.
There's a rather advanced topic in Python that many beginner and intermediate learners find hard. I remember being put off learning this topic so many times in an earlier stage of my own learning journey. If I include the name in the title, I fear many will do the same and decide this topic is not for them—not yet.
But I think I can explain this topic well to the uninitiated—as you can see, I don't lack confidence when it comes to explaining complex concepts clearly! It's my job, after all.
I tried this method in a live lesson recently. I made sure I only mentioned the topic's name towards the end of my session. And the way I introduced elements of the lesson kept the real nature of the topic hidden until late in the session.
I'll follow the same path when I translate this lesson into a written article. And, of course, the title will have no reference to the topic either. Otherwise, what's the point?!
Drawbacks • The drawbacks are obvious, but I'll state them anyway. Anyone "just browsing" is unlikely to want to read the article. Anyone looking for this topic in particular won't find it. Yes, the topic will be mentioned several times towards the end, but you don't need to be an SEO guru to know that won't make a difference.
I'm relying on my regular readers, those who read my articles every week or almost every week. They may decide to read it based on their previous experience reading my articles—if they're still subscribed to my substack, I have to loosely assume they like the articles, at least a tiny bit.
But, for those who've been putting off learning this topic, which I'm not mentioning here, of course, the experience will be worth it—hopefully.
Afterword • Today's post is less coherent than usual. Sorry. But for those who've been following Breaking the Rules from the start, you know that I'm not writing this for you! These posts are my personal journal, where I record my reflections. So, I'm publishing this draft-like post anyway.
Speaking of which, you may see posts more frequently on Breaking the Rules in the coming weeks and months since I'm planning to…
…Nah, I'll tell you another time.
Love it! You know I'm a sucker for cute titles. My book on graphs has absolutely zero names of any algorithms in the table of contents. Here's a brief list of some of the chapter titles:
- The lurker's labyrinth
- The major's new supercomputer
- Behind the enemy lines
- ...
Betcha you can't guess which algoritmos are they about?