Thank you for your help -- I have been beating my head against this for quite some time. Putting the cursor at the beginning of the line does in fact work.

I'm going to argue that there is still a problem here, though. Here's what I read at http://orgmode.org/manual/Structure-editing.html:

"If the command is used at the beginning of a headline, the new headline is created before the current line."

That doesn't say "beginning of line". I think where my cursor was sitting was the only reasonable interpretation of "beginning of headline". Furthermore, there's nothing in that paragraph that tells me to expect the behavior I did see.

The behavior I encountered is confusing because it is discontinuous -- as demonstrated in the attached images, if I have the cursor one character into the heading, then everything after the cursor goes on the lower line and everything before the cursor goes on the upper line. If I move the cursor one character to the left then this is suddenly reversed. And if I move the cursor all the way to the beginning of the line we revert back to the "everything after the cursor goes on the lower line" behavior.

Kevin S. Van Horn, Ph.D. | Principal Engineer
D: 801.290.3823 | Salt Lake City Office (Mountain Time)

-----Original Message-----
From: Bastien Guerry [mailto:bastienguerry@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Bastien
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2014 11:12 PM
To: Kevin Van Horn
Cc: 'emacs-orgmode@gnu.org'
Subject: Re: M-<RET> does not work as described in the manual

Hi Kevin,

Kevin Van Horn <kevin.vanhorn@themodellers.com> writes:

> The attached PNG files illustrate the problem, for two different
> cases: one without any notes under the heading, and one with notes 
> under the heading.

In the screenshots, I see that the point is not really at the start of the line when you hit M-RET, but at the start of the heading's content.
You need to put the point at the start of the line.

Or am I missing something?

--
 Bastien