I watched the Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (hulu.com) cartoon all the time when I was a kid. While I enjoyed the Mr. Peabody segments more than any other part of the show, I always found the “multiple option” endings of the Rocky and Bullwinkle bits to be incredibly confusing. Sure, they were sort of relevant to the show you just watched, but couldn’t the writers come up with one good title for the next episode?

Well, I was a kid, what did I know. For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, here are a few examples. At the very end, two titles would pop up as the voice over would say something like, “on our next show,”:

• All That Glitters or Baby, It’s Gold Outside
• Go Down Mooses or The Fall Guy
• Boris Goes for Broke or A Friend in Need Is a Fiend…Indeed

Brilliant, right? Now older, and a little more cultured, I can understand what the possible titles mean, and I can see that they’re (mostly) pointing to the same theme. Beyond being a cultural oddity of an antique television show which still has some fading relevance, it’s a great technique for expanding your writing. Coming up with one title or theme to work on is great, coming up with two that are linked immediately expands your understanding of what you want to write about.

I’ll talk about it in the context of a timed class essay, the kind you get barraged with in college. It’s equally applicable to writing a blog entry in 30 minutes. You start off with a topic, come up with a few points, and then start writing. You’ll get stuck in one of two places, your opening statement, or your conclusion, either way you waste time having to think about just what all of those points really have to do with the topic.

For practice, I rewrote some headers I found in my Google Reader feed in Rocky and Bullwinkle fashion:

iPhone App Store Rejects Find a New Home: “The Land of Misfit iPhone apps” or “approval, please Apple, we want some more”.

Live view of the eastbound traffic at the Weston tolls: “If you lived at the toll booth, you’d be home by now” or “the Slow and the Furious”.

White House party crashers’ appearance on “Larry King Live” canceled: “Beauty and Deceit” or “hello caller from Washington, D.C. Do you have two forms of identification?”

The strength to this technique is not coming up with something clever (although, it helps if you end up generating all your titles like this), it’s the fact that you’ve created two distinct statements which summarize the content. If you can come up with three, quickly, all the better. The more simple, singular statements you can make about a topic, the better you understand it.

Is this technique worth it if it takes you 10 or 20 minutes to come up with decent titles? Probably not. But if you find your writing is too formulaic, or two often ends up being an opening statement, a list of your key points, and no good closing statement or coherence to the points you chose, give it a shot. It’s a lot easier than building a Wayback machine to fix those problems after the fact.