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Please refer to this Yahoo article:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/adrian-peterson-thinks-michael-vick-would-make-minnesota-playoff-team-162656529.html

I think the headline should say

"Adrian Peterson thinks Michael Vick would make Minnesota a playoff team"

The current headline

"Adrian Peterson thinks Michael Vick would make Minnesota playoff team"

just gives a different meaning. It means something along the line that Minnesota is a playoff team, Vick would qualify to be in the roster.

Which headline would you write?

Kevin Le - Khnle
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  • It depends on the space. Titles omit as many words as they can to fit in the paper with a large font. Sports fans know that nobody 'makes' a playoff team. You make the regular season team. – Oldcat Mar 06 '14 at 19:36
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    Dropping articles, conjunctions, and other short words is very common in headlinese, which varies from standard English to allow for compactness. At least the words are still recognizable— Korean newspapers sometimes still use hanja (a set of Chinese characters) also for reasons of compactness, even though they are no longer taught. – choster Mar 06 '14 at 19:43
  • While normally articles get dropped from headlines, I think the ambiguity here is bad enough to recommend the "a playoff" version. – Andrew Lazarus Mar 06 '14 at 20:22
  • In addition to the space issue mentioned by @phenry, I don't think there's a lot of confusion here; nobody in the writer's target audience would mistake Minnesota for a current playoff team. – Joe Mar 06 '14 at 21:57

2 Answers2

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I agree with the poster: Objectively (and absent any outside knowledge for context) the quoted headline invites the interpretation that Minnesota already is a playoff-caliber team and that Adrian Peterson thinks Michael Vick is a good enough player to make (that is, not get cut from) the squad.

As for the argument that the headline writer was constrained either by (a) space limitations or (b) a rule against indefinite articles at Yahoo Sports, it is clear from the link included in the question that (a) is not the case, since there is plenty of space for the indefinite article in what is already a two-line head, and (b) is not the case, since a quick search of other Yahoo Sports headlines in the vicinity of this one yields "San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh does push-ups with a walrus" and "Is AJ McCarron an NFL starting QB?"

But even if space were at a premium in this instance, you could easily construct an accurate headline that is shorter than the one actually used. Here again is the original wording:

Adrian Peterson thinks Michael Vick would make Minnesota playoff team

The entire news item is built on the following Twitter tweet by Adrian Peterson:

@MikeVick would intently make the vikings a playoff team!

Since Peterson didn't merely hint or suggest that Michael Vick would "intently" make Minnesota a playoff team, why does the headline writer find it necessary to use the verb "thinks" instead of the shorter "says"? That change alone would clear enough space to accommodate the missing "a":

Adrian Peterson says Michael Vick would make Minnesota a playoff team

But as long as we're looking for ways to save space, why not replace the verb after "Peterson" with a colon? And why include Michael Vick's first name—has there been another Vick around the NFL since Marcus Vick washed out in 2007? And why say "Minnesota" when you could say "Vikings"? Incorporating those perfectly reasonable alterations would give us this headline:

Adrian Peterson: Vick would make Vikings a playoff team

Or you could flip the wording around:

Vikings would be a playoff team with Vick, Peterson says

The unintended meaning of the original headline would have been easy to avoid if anyone at Yahoo Sports had thought twice about it—but no one did.

Sven Yargs
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Headlines have traditionally been written to fit into a given space, and as such, headline writers frequently omit articles, prepositions, and other small words in order to save space. In the worst cases, this can lead to crash blossoms. Space is less of a consideration online than it is in a newspaper or magazine, but old habits die hard (and, to be fair, some online headline writers may still face limitations, such as headline fields that only allow a certain number of characters).

Which headline would I write? I would write the best headline that fits in the space provided, and hope it doesn't lead to misunderstandings.

phenry
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