Choosing an Effective Title
March 23, 2005
By: Tim North, www.scribe.com.au
"Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior and are disgraced by the inferior."George Bernard Shaw
It may seem trivial to tell you to choose a good title for your next written work, but the importance of this task should not be underestimated. A good title may be the difference between a reader choosing to look at your work or passing over it.
Many readers will learn of your work while surrounded by other documents that are competing for their attention. For example, they may see it while:
- scanning the printed documents on a bookshelf;
- looking through the titles in a printed index;
- looking at a bound collection of documents; or
- searching the Internet.
A good title can help your work to stand out from the crowd. Here then are some guidelines for choosing a good title.
TITLE GUIDELINE ONE
USE THE FEWEST NUMBER OF WORDS THAT EXPRESS WHAT YOU WISH TO SAY
When choosing a title, avoid generic phrases like 'An investigation of...', 'A study into...' and 'Observations on...'. These are implied anyway and add little value.
Compare these two titles:
A study of the effects of chaos as a source of complexity and diversity in evolutionary processesChaos as a source of complexity and diversity in evolution
The first title takes seventeen words, the second one ten. The first one contains extra words that convey slightly more information (study, effects and processes) but at the cost of making the title notably longer and less memorable.
Here is another example:
A description of a variety of different tools for creating an interactive virtual-cinema environmentTools for interactive virtual cinema
The first title clearly employs more words than are needed (fourteen versus five). It does contain more information, but at the cost of being wordier, harder to remember and burying the key words at the end of the sentence.
Indeed, in the first title, the key word virtual-cinema is the thirteenth word in the sentence, You have to read almost the entire title before finding out what the paper is about. This leads us to our next guideline ...
TITLE GUIDELINE TWO
PUT YOUR TOPIC WORDS NEAR THE START OF THE TITLE
Titles may contain several key words or key phrases (see guideline three), but one of these words or phrases will usually be more significant than the others. Let's call these the topic words.
Putting the topic words near the start of the title makes it easier for the reader to decide what your document is about and if it should be read.
Consider the following titles in which the topic words are shown in capitals. In all cases the topic words comes near the start of the title.
CHAOS as a Source Of Complexity and Diversity in EvolutionThe USC BRAIN PROJECT: Confronting Models With Data
VLSI NEURAL NETWORKS: Design Challenges and Opportunities
Low-level VISION IN INSECTS and Applications to Robot
Navigation
TITLE GUIDELINE THREE
INCLUDE SEARCHABLE KEY WORDS IN YOUR TITLE
Articles are usually indexed by key words. Frequently, particularly with web-based search engines, these key words are taken from the document's title. It follows that people will be more likely to find your work if its title contains the significant key words.
Compare these two titles:
An Interim Report from the Myers ProjectThe Myers Project Interim Report into the Effects of Sleep
Deprivation on Memory Retention
Not only does the second title bring the topic phrase ('the Myers Project') to the start of the title, but it also includes additional key words: sleep deprivation and memory retention. Readers searching using these terms will have an increased chance of finding the document.
Note that this guideline is somewhat at odds with guideline one: use the fewest number of words. Clearly a balance needs to be found between titles that are brief and titles that contain a suitable number of key words.
With these guidelines in mind, you should have no trouble choosing an effective title for your next publication.
(Repost; originally posted March 27, 2002.)
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Adapted from WRITING SCIENTIFIC PAPERS by Tim North. This easy-to-read e-book is just $12.95 and comes with a 30-day, money-back guarantee. www.scribe.com.au/ebooks.html
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