• xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This headline is almost incoherent, I wish they’d stop teaching journalists about newspaper shorthand headlines. We’re not limited to broadleaf sized headlines any more, just put some fucking words in there so it makes sense.

    • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yes, even just the first paragraph makes sense.

      Staff members were told of GAME’s impending change to force staff onto zero hours contracts, first reported yesterday by Eurogamer, via mass video calls held on Microsoft Teams.

    • penquin@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      I have a very hard time understanding these headlines, but I normally blame it on my English (English isn’t my first language), but good to know that that’s not the case. Reading them twice or more doesn’t help. I just give up and let it go.

      • M500@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        It’s honestly a problem for native speakers. So many times headlines make no sense or are extremely misleading.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I got to ask, has reading comprehension really come down that much in the recent decades?

      Could the title be expanded to be more prosaic? Sure!
      But at the same time, it’s intuitively and entirely understandable.

      Who? GAME staff
      What? Discovered something
      What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
      How? Via a mass Microsoft Teams call

      Or, written together, the title up above. And that’s a completely normal sentence structure, it’s essentially how your brain should expect a sentence conveying that information to be structured, or the final part would be at the start (“Via a mass microsoft teams call…”).

      • bisby@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts

        This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.

        You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        7 months ago

        See? I understood it that GAME staff discovered that zero hours contracts (whatever that is) move via team calls (wherever, and however that happens).

        So much to reading comprehension. That title is trash.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I just find it weird that you felt compelled to post an explanation for something that is “intuitively and entirely understandable”. It’s almost as if you knew that lots of people couldn’t understand it.

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        Sure, but while I understand the sentence structure I still don’t know what it’s talking about without the article itself

        I think the point they are making is that we use these short titles even though we don’t need to. It might be correct, but why not make better use of the medium