The Heading That Stopped Mid-Sentence

Six product pages on this site were printing a heading that stopped mid-sentence. On the copper watering can, the line above the verdict read “This is a small.” On a hand-made platter it read “Eighteen years in.” On a black clay bowl, “In San Bartolo Coyotepec.” Those are the first few words of a real sentence, cut off before the sentence said anything.

Nothing about the underlying writing was wrong. The verdict text on every one of those pages is complete, checked and correct. What was wrong is what our own template did to it.

The verdict room’s heading is not written by hand. Our theme takes the verdict’s opening and lifts it into the heading, cutting at the first comma, and prints a house heading instead when the result is too long or too short. That design is deliberate and it works on most pages. It fails on a sentence that opens with a list, because the first comma arrives before the sentence has finished being a sentence: “This is a small, precise, expensive watering can” is cut after the word “small”.

We found this because we built the check that predicts it. Until this week nothing on our side computed what the template would actually print, so the defect was invisible in every place anyone would have looked: the field was correct, the page validated, and the only way to see the problem was to read the rendered heading and notice it made no sense.

The first version of that check was itself wrong, in a way worth admitting. It assumed the template cut at the end of the first sentence, which is the intuitive rule and not the rule our theme uses. Written that way it flagged the wrong pages for the wrong reasons. The numbers we acted on came from reading the template’s own code and copying what it actually does.

The fix on those six pages changes punctuation and word order in the opening sentence so the cut lands after a complete thought. No claim, number, price or source moved on any of them, and nothing was removed: the words that were there are still there.

What we did not do is rewrite the rest of the estate. Most product pages do not produce a usable heading from their opening and fall back to our standard one instead. That fallback is honest and reads correctly, and we decided it is not worth rewriting good pages to replace it. We would rather tell you that most pages carry a house heading than quietly rewrite ninety pages to manufacture individuality.

The writing rule changed too, which is the part that matters for pages we have not written yet. Whoever writes a verdict now checks what the template will make of its first clause before the page ships, and has two honest options: write an opening whose first clause stands on its own, or accept the house heading on purpose. A heading that stops mid-sentence is no longer one of the choices.